Dave Martins wrote the song we all know by heart

Dave Martins died in August 2024, and the tributes came fast — politicians, musicians, people who had never met him but knew every word to "Not a Blade of Grass." That song is bigger than most national anthems. It plays at cricket matches, at independence ceremonies, at weddings where someone's uncle has had three beers and needs to make a point about sovereignty.

Martins didn't write it as a manifesto. He wrote it in 1979, when Guyana and Venezuela were arguing over the Essequibo — again — and he was tired of hearing that we might give up land because someone drew a line on a map in 1899. The song is short, direct, and impossible to argue with: Not a blade of grass, not a grain of sand, not an inch of water, will we give away. No metaphor, no poetry. Just a line in the dirt.

He was born in Georgetown in 1945, the son of a Guyanese mother and a Grenadian father, and grew up in a house where calypso and country music played on the same radio. By the time he was twenty, he had a band. By the time he was thirty, Tradewinds was the biggest thing in the Caribbean that wasn't Bob Marley. They played soca, calypso, reggae, country — whatever fit the room. Martins wrote most of the songs, sang lead, and kept the band together for five decades.

"Not a Blade of Grass" is the one everyone remembers, but it wasn't even a hit at first. It was a B-side. Radio stations in Trinidad and Barbados didn't play it much — too political, too Guyanese. But in Guyana, it stuck. People sang it at protests, at parties, at school assemblies. It became the song you sang when you wanted to remind someone that this place is ours.

Martins moved to Trinidad in the 1970s, then to Barbados, where he spent the last decades of his life. He kept writing, kept touring, kept playing shows where the crowd was half Guyanese expats who needed to hear "Not a Blade of Grass" one more time. He never got precious about it. He played it every time they asked.

He wrote other songs — "Hooking Meh," "Melody," "Come Dig the Calypso" — and some of them were bigger in Trinidad or Barbados than they ever were in Guyana. But "Not a Blade of Grass" is the one that outlasted everything else. It's the one that gets sung at independence ceremonies, at cricket matches, at family gatherings where someone needs to remind the table that we don't give up what's ours.

Martins never called himself a poet or a politician. He called himself a songwriter. He wrote what he saw, what he felt, what he thought people needed to hear. And he was right.

When he died, the tributes came from presidents and prime ministers, from musicians and journalists, from people who had never met him but knew every word. They all said the same thing: he gave us the song we needed. The song we still need.

Not a blade of grass.