RE: The Bob Gibson connection. Long quote & more than a bit puzzling but… verrry interesting:

“Then I made a deal to go to Nassau and lay over until the next ship came around, so I had six or seven days. Brian [sic] Blake was still alive and playing then in Nassau. That was his stomping ground – the Royal Palms* – or something – Hotel. Also on the ship**, I met young guy named Roy Model [sic]. Lord Composer was his working name. He had a six-piece calypso band from Kingston***. I spent two weeks right in Kingston, staying at his house, going to church with him and his mother to hear music the likes of which I've never heard since – in black churches, going up in the Cameroons**** which were the mountains in central Jamaica, where Roy's cousin was the leader of a digging gang.

None of the work was done by machines. It was all done by hand labor, and the guy who led the singing was held in such high regard that he was employed by the guys on the crew. He was paid standard wages by the boss because he dug too, but he was also paid a bonus, so it was very competitive. I don't know how much the fee was, but he was making something like double salary to sing these work songs. For the money, anyone would have done it, but you had to be good at it. Roy's cousin was on of the best guys, so learned a lot of work songs….”

On the Tarriers' cover:
“The Tarriers version starts off with, “Hil un galy rider, hil un galy...” which is a digging song from the Cameroons. I taught them that and the banana boat song, which Belafonte called Day-O, but I didn't learn that from anybody. I was there in Kingston when they were walking with these bunches of bananas on their heads to load the ship. It was cheaper to hire labor than it was to get a conveyor belt.”
[I Come for to Sing, Bender & Gibson, 1999, revised ed.2000]


*Blind Blake at the Royal Victoria maybe?
**S.S. Queen of Nassau
***Lord Composer and His Calypso Champions. See Songs from the Caribbean, ART Records, ALP-15, 1955.

LP notes: Band was AKA “The Silver Seas Hotel Orchestra” (not all from Jamaica) and the Banana Song (track B8) is a different, entirely unrelated, song about bananas.

****Cameroon Mountains &c: Doesn't ring any bells but that's just me.

Omri Mundle was based in Ochos Rios (the Silver Seas Hotel.) The region known as “Cockpit Country” contains both the aforementioned Maroon Town in the west and Brown's Town in the east. The “Dry Harbor Mountains” are roughly between Brown's Town and Ochos Rios.

Geo Trivia: Harry Belafonte's mother (Aboukir) and Bob Marley (Nine Mile) both hailed from the same general area. Katherine Dunham's Journey to Accompong is set just a tad to the south.