May 9, 1918-December 3, 2001
One of Bermuda’s top entertainers during the golden era of tourism, Hubert Smith Sr. serenaded thousands of locals and tourists, performed for princes and presidents, and wrote Bermuda’s unofficial national anthem, Bermuda is Another World.
Smith, whose career spanned more than half a century, started out entertaining locals at Colonial Opera House on Victoria Street, Hamilton. When hotels opened up to black Bermudian entertainers after the Second World War, he made the transition to the lucrative hotel circuit. Smith was able to earn his living working full-time as an entertainer for most of his life, although the era when tourists were clamouring for local entertainment had drawn to an end towards the climax of his career.
Smith was raised in a musical household by his father, Aubrey, and his mother, Beulah. His father was a fisherman and a keen amateur musician and collector of musical instruments, and gave Smith a ukulele, which he played almost daily. His uncle, Alex, was a fine trumpeter. There were weekend jam sessions at the family home in Spanish Point. By the age of six, Smith had made his own guitar. He also wrote musical ditties as a child and took violin lessons, after being inspired by an English jazz violinist, Jack Derby, a frequent participant in the jam sessions.
When he left school at age 13, Smith became an apprentice baker. He later worked as a mechanic and as a pilot of tourist tour boats. He never put music aside. Working nights as a stagehand at the Opera House exposed him to all facets of performing from tap dancing to singing, and also to the talents of top musicians, among them Lance Hayward.
He began playing and singing at the Opera House at the age of 15 after taking guitar lessons from a cousin, Freddie Smith, and from Robert “Duke” Joell. Bandleader Mark Williams heard Smith play and insisted that he find a music teacher—and so began Smith’s tutelage with Johnny Roma, a guitarist and violinist who worked on the Queen of Bermuda, which called in at Bermuda each week. Smith would later mentor many of the Island’s young musicians, as well as teaching guitar.
Smith studied music composition with Williams and went on to work as a singer with Kenny Iris’ 12-piece band, as well as with bandleaders Jack Hollis, Ernie Leader, Jack Wallace and Roy Butterfield, and with Al Davis’ band at Belmont Hotel. Smith, whose favourite music was jazz, also played in Thursday afternoon jam sessions with Bermuda’s top musicians as well as musicians visiting the Island, including the legendary Woody Herman.
But by 1948, sensing a change in musical tastes, Smith turned to calypso. One of the first calypso songs he wrote was Green Ticket, about female tourists who would supposedly be ticketed by police if their shorts were too brief. In 1951, he formed his own band, Hubert Smith and the Coral Islanders, which took its name from the hotel where he was based, Coral Island in Flatts. The band really took off after it moved to Clay House Inn.
Its popularity led to an offer in 1958 to replace the foreign band at Princess Hotel in Hamilton. Management wanted Smith and his group to swap their colourful calypso shirts for dinner jackets, but after an argument that went on for about six weeks, the Coral Islanders won the day.
They remained at Princess until the early 1960s, when they moved to other hotels. Between 1962 and 1972, Hubert Smith and his Coral Islanders performed in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom as part of the annual marketing blitzes, known as briefing tours, organised by the Department of Tourism.
He wrote Bermuda Is Another World in 1969 for a briefing tour after being asked to compose a song called ‘Bermuda is a Different World’. During his ritual morning swim off Spanish Point, he composed the entire song, words and music, changing ‘different’ to ‘another’ to create his signature piece. “I was writing about the beauty of a country I was born in, and proud of,” he once said.
Band members changed over the years, but usually included his two sons Hubert Jr. and George, with whom the elder Smith released a recording called We Three. Other musicians who played with the Coral Islanders included Kenny Iris, Mike Stowe, Max Smith, Stan Seymour, Quinton Harvey, Jimmy Landy, Alvin Brangman, Dayton Wharton, Earl Darrell, Olive Bean, Graham Bean, Charlie Butterfield and Albert Fox. Joe Wylie and Anthony Ferraz wrote some of the music.
Smith shared the stage with such superstars as Canadian songbird, Anne Murray, and pop singer Engelbert Humperdinck. Actors Clark Gable, Gary Cooper, British Prime Ministers Winston Churchill and Harold Macmillan, French Prime Minister Joseph Laniel, US Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and Lyndon Johnson, and future US president John Kennedy—when he was a young and unknown midshipman—were among those who heard him perform over the years. Royalty he met included the Queen, Prince Philip, Princess Margaret, Princess Anne and Prince Charles.
Aside from his musical contributions to Bermudian society, he was also a trailblazer in the area of civil rights. An avid golfer, he was a founding member and president of Ocean View Golf Club—at the time, the Island’s ‘black golf club’ as blacks were forbidden from playing the other courses. With some colleagues at Ocean View, and with the support of successive Governors Sir Julian Gascoigne and Lord Martonmere, he chaired a committee that set about integrating Bermuda’s golf courses.
He put forward a member’s request at Mid Ocean Golf Club, which was accepted, and the other clubs soon began accepting black members, too. In 1969, Smith became the first black member of Belmont Golf Club, and in 1987 joined Riddell’s Bay Golf Club.
Smith was a member of the committee that was successful in opening up the Bermuda Tennis Stadium to blacks—and was a founder, or member, of several social and sporting clubs, including Blue Water Anglers Club, Leopard’s Club, Rainbow Tennis Club and Somers Isles Tennis Club.
Smith, who performed well into the 1990s, was also a founding member and the first president of the Bermuda Federation of Musicians and Variety Artistes.
He appeared in several films and television series, including the film Lost Lagoon (1958), which was shot in Bermuda. He provided music for the series Crunch and Des, which ran from 1955-1956, and sang and acted in the 1958 series Adventures of the Sea Hawk. Both were US productions that were filmed at Darrell’s Island.
Smith also performed for many local charitable events, visited schools, and for many years he and his band performed during the Christmas season for the patients of St. Brendan’s Hospital (now the Mid-Atlantic Wellness Institute).
Smith received numerous awards including the Queen’s Certificate and Badge of Honour in 1969. He was named ‘Man of the Year’ by Sandys Rotary Club and received an Adlev Entertainment Award in 2000. Smith was honoured, posthumously, with a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Bermuda Arts Council in 2002. Accepting the award on his father’s behalf, son George described the 30 years working with his father as “the best days of my life”.
He was inducted into Bermuda’s Music Hall of Fame in 2008—and, also that year, was one of several musicians honoured by the Post Office in a Bermuda Troubadours stamp issue.
Smith belonged to the generation of musicians that reaped rewards from the thriving tourism industry. He made numerous recordings and left an indelible mark on the music scene. At the time of his death, many of Bermuda’s musicians had become victims of changing economic times and musical tastes and struggled to find regular work.
Three years before his death, Smith made his final recording, Bermuda Santa Claus, which also featured his son, George, and grandson, Dean Ming.
Smith passed away on December 3, 2001, after suffering a heart attack. “The day before he died was my birthday, and that night he called and sang Happy Birthday to me,” says his daughter, Velda. “It was so beautiful, and as he sang, I thought ‘that must be what an angel sounds like’. The next day, he was gone.”
Years after his death, visitors to Bermuda are still being charmed by Smith’s trademark song, Bermuda is Another World. His grandson Dean Ming, who operates a transport business, sings beautifully.
In 2007, he was taking care of the travel needs of some guests of the Bermuda International Film Festival. Bermudian actor Earl Cameron, a friend of Smith’s, was at a private dinner where the guests also included Michael Douglas, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Richard Dreyfuss and Carrie Fisher. Ming sang his grandfather’s signature song for Cameron, as a tribute to his grandfather, and that prompted all of the famous actors present to sing or recite a passage from one of their films or plays.
