Showing 15635 results

Irving Burgie has been called one of the greatest composers of Caribbean music. Son of a mother from Barbados and a father from Virginia, he was born in New York City. After high school, he sang at various clubs in New York — under the stage name Lord Burgess — until he was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1943. He served in an all-Black unit in China, Burma and India. After the war, he was accepted at Juillard School of Music and expected to become a classical singer; he also studied music at both the University of Arizona and the University of Southern California. However, he met singer Harry Belafonte at Camp Minisink run by the Harlem-based New York City Mission Society in upstate New York, and the two became friends. He and William Attaway collaborated on a version of the lyrics for the Banana Boat song (Day-O) for Belafonte, a major hit of the mid-1950s, and he went on to create 33 other songs for the Calypso star. In 1966, he wrote the lyrics for the national anthem for newly independent Barbados. He was inducted into the Songwriters’ Hall of Fame in 2007.

Ordained as a priest in Ireland, Edmund Burke came to Québec in 1786. He served as a missionary on Ile d'Orléans (1791-1794) and in the area of Detroit and Ohio (1794-1796).

George Bull Boothsby Burland was born on May 24, 1828, or 1829, in Loggan, Wexford County, Ireland.

He was a Montreal businessman and philanthropist. He was educated in England by private teachers. In the 1840s, he moved to Canada with his family. In 1844, he joined the Hamilton Gazette, a property owned by his uncle, who also worked there as a publisher. He moved to Montreal around 1848 and worked with engraver and printer George H. Matthews. In 1864, he joined forces with George Lafricain, Nathaniel Barber and George Bishop to buy Matthews' company and they found the Burland-Lafricain & Company, specializing in lithography. A few years later, the company merged with its main rival, William Cumming Smillie's company. It became the British American Bank Note Company, whose business consisted of printing postage stamps, bank bills, tax stamps, bonds, and stock certificates. Burland served as Vice-President of the company from 1866, before becoming President and General Manager from 1881 until his death. In the 1870s and the 1880s, he also ran a printing company that printed books and periodicals such as the Canadian Illustrated News. In addition to his commercial activities, he was interested in public health. In 1902, he became President of the Protestant Hospital for the Insane in Verdun and one of the founding members of the Anti-Tuberculosis League of Montreal.

In 1858, he married Clarissa Healy Cochrane (1829–1890). In 1894, he married Amelia Elizabeth Haines (1845–1905) and in 1906, he married Hildegarde Florence Beard (1870–1928). He died on May 22, 1907, in Los Angeles, California and is buried in Montreal, Quebec.