"If You Leave (My Island)." Composer unknown. Chief Moa's boys played it for me once. Those guys had some of the most beautiful melodies I've ever heard. I remember this one.
Moa, chief of Eli Eli on Tutuila, was the son of Moa, former High Chief of Manua, a neighboring Island to Tutuila, of the Samoan Archipelago, the largest of which is "Western Samoa". High Chief Moa participated in negotiations with the United States to Make Tutuila, or "Eastern Samoa" a U.S. territory, and was careful to only accept those parts of the US constitution he thought applicable to his people. When Lynden Johnson, then US president, visited, as he walked to the podium on Samoan fine mats to give a speech, he was informed by those with him that he was walking on money.
Tutuila is one of the finest deep water ports in the world, arguably the best of all ports. An immense dormant volcano that collapsed on one side into the deep ocean, it's often described as a very deep port surrounded by land. Among other things its the island of the container sky scrapers, as well as home to American and Korean tuna fishing fleets, at least back in the seventies. The main town, Pango Pango, was also where the illustrious author, Robert Louis Stephenson, lived.
For the visual of the clip I put in a slide show of some of my paintings: "Hurricane", "Island Canoe", "Them across the River", "The City" and "The Traveler". "City" and "Traveler" are some early paintings that go back to 1964. Back then, to save time I signed my work with a chevron and three circles, one of the more common patterns in heraldry.
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