I brought home this LP a few weeks ago.  I thought the cover was great - and I loved the concept: a happy white guy singing reggae/calypso/country songs.  The back of the album showed him with another white guy and three natives.  It also had an ad for Toyota, Cayman’s No. 1 selling car.  The liner notes come from the Galleon Beach Hotel, a resort which was then home to the Barefoot man, where he played a nightly gig.

Despite all these promising signs, I didn’t really expect much out of the album.  I brought it home, showed my wife the cover, plopped it in and we were blown away.  We love it!  It’s by far the most played record that I’ve brought home this summer.  It’s happy and carefree: a cross between Jimmy Buffett and Arrow.  It’s funny, a bit cheesy, but undeniably catchy and good.  We know most of the words to all the songs - and every song on the album is excellent.

One of the standouts on the album is the song Ching Ching - it’s about ol’ Barefoot falling in love with a chubby Island girl.  The chorus has the lyrics:

 She’s as black as a Ching Ching, oh but she’s sweet, built like a breadfruit, she’s got plenty of meat, but that’s how we like ‘em, the bigger the better, lots of woman there, she’s got curlers in she hair. 

At first we found the words to be borderline inappropriate or racist - but I found that “black as a ching ching” is a common expression, with ching ching referring to a native bird found in the Carribean. 

It also turns out that Barefoot Man is still alive and well and playing and living in the Cayman Islands.  His voice is deeper and more weathered now - but he’s still loving life and singing about it, barefoot as ever. 

What a life, huh?

to Ching Ching