World of Jamaican Music

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An illustrated map of the creators of Jamaican music and how they are connected.

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Adina Edwards

Artist. Reggae

Active
1939-2008
Sunrise
c. 1926
Sunset
April 4, 2008
Also known as
Adinah Edwards

Adina Edwards was a blind soprano whose career ran from the stage shows of the 1940s to a Jamaican number one in 1972, "Don't Forget to Remember."

A student at the Salvation Army Institute for the Blind, she began performing in its holiday program in 1939, and by 1946 the press was writing about a "twenty-year-old blind soprano." At Eric Coverley's New Year Morning Show at the Ward Theatre in 1949, Coverley told the audience: "This girl is not here because she is blind but because she can sing." In 1959 she placed third on Vere Johns's Opportunity Hour with a gospel song. By the early 1960s she and the harmonica player Roy Richards, also blind, were among the best-known names in Jamaican popular music.

What carried her was the voice: a warm, expressive soprano that the press of the 1940s heard moving from spirituals to light classical pieces, with gospel always at its root. She accompanied herself on accordion and keyboard, both self-taught, and for years she also sang on King Street, downtown Kingston's main shopping street, rather than on the theater circuit where most of her contemporaries worked.

Tommy Cowan, who said he found her singing on a Kingston street corner, recorded her for his own label after leaving Dynamic Sounds; "Don't Forget to Remember," promoted by Byron Lee, went, in Cowan's words, "straight to number one," and Dynamic issued the album Soul of Adina in 1973. She ran a large nursery in Kencot, Kingston, in the 1970s, sang at the 1982 "Salute to Our Musical Heritage" show and at an all-island gospel festival in 1983, and departed in 2008. Cowan gave her accordion to the Jamaica Music Museum.

Last updated October 31, 2026

Connections

Notes

  1. Heather Augustyn, "Get Up Adina Edwards," SkaBook (blog), March 19, 2016, read at https://skabook.com/tag/tommy-cowan/.
  2. Augustyn, "Get Up Adina Edwards," quoting the 1946 press report and Coverley.
  3. Augustyn, "Get Up Adina Edwards."
  4. "Blind Musicians Lead the Way," Jamaica Gleaner, October 5, 2014, http://past.jamaica-gleaner.com/article/entertainment/20141005/blind-musicians-lead-way-0, which calls them "big names in Jamaican popular music during the early 1960s."
  5. Augustyn, "Get Up Adina Edwards," quoting a 1946 Daily Gleaner report on her "warm, colourful voice" and a repertoire running "from Negro Spirituals to the light classical," and describing her as a "self-taught accordion and keyboard player." On King Street, Kimberley Small, "Blind Performers No 'Poor Likkle Ting,'" Jamaica Gleaner, May 25, 2018, https://jamaica-gleaner.com/article/entertainment/20180527/blind-performers-no-poor-likkle-ting, which says she "didn't perform on shows like her contemporaries."
  6. Augustyn, "Get Up Adina Edwards." The Gleaner also calls it a "Tommy Cowan-produced recording" of 1972 and says she "accepted collections for her performances on the streets." "Women Who Shaped Jamaican Music," Jamaica Gleaner, March 8, 2012, https://jamaica-gleaner.com/gleaner/20120308/ent/ent1.html.
  7. Augustyn, "Get Up Adina Edwards," which gives the date of her death as April 4, 2008.

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