Gordon Henderson

The story so far.

Gordon Henderson’s career is closely tied to cadence-lypso. A Division of Culture biography, first printed in Dominica’s Arts & Culture Magazine in 1994, says he was born in Portsmouth and began performing at St Mary’s Academy in Roseau, singing and playing guitar in school bands and entering local calypso as Might Bee. He later led Voltage 4, which toured Martinique in 1970 and then worked as a house band in Guadeloupe, and sang with Les Vikings before forming Exile One with fellow Dominican musicians. According to that account, he called the band’s up-tempo Creole style cadence-lypso to set it apart from Haitian cadence rampa, and Exile One went on to sign with Barclay Records in Paris. A second Division of Culture essay notes his later solo work with lapo kabwit and jing ping rhythms on songs including L’Hivernage and Ba dang. The listening entries below come from a 2012 provider edition, Greetings From Martinique & Guatamala, and are not presented as the original recordings of those songs.