ABSTRACT
This was the refrain of the summer I spent in 1962 recording folk songs in many of the small islands of the West Indies as, one by one, they moved away from British control and into independence. The children sensed that something was in the air and—as only children can do— summed up the whole situation in a song. This was their topical song that summer, but they had many, many more—a potpourri of fragments from all their many-sourced island traditions.
