Biography
Lord Kitchener (born Aldwyn Roberts, 1922 – 2000), was a distinguished musician from Trinidad and Tobago, he has been described as "the great master of calypso music". Roberts was born in Arima, Trinidad, under British rule at the time, on April 18, 1922. His father was a blacksmith and amateur musician, he taught him to play the guitar from an early age. He died when Kitchener was 14, forcing him to try to make a living by playing music, first on the streets. He gradually became known in Arima as he also won the Arima Municipality calypso music competition, five times between 1938 and 1942.
He moved to Port of Spain in 1943 where he joined the Roving Brigade band. He became known for his musical innovations and also for his lyrics, critical of the British government on the island. During World War II he became popular with American troops stationed in his homeland, and after the war he was invited to perform in New York. He toured America and then Jamaica for six months in 1947–48. He went to England in 1948 where within 2 years he became a regular performer on BBC radio and was in high demand for live performances. It found further success in the UK in the 1950s, gaining many fans in the expatriate communities of the West Indies.
Kitchener opened a nightclub in Manchester and also had a successful residency at The Sunset in London. Further performances and tours in the USA followed and in 1962 he returned to Trinidad. For 30 years, he maintained his own music scene "Calypso Revue", where he performed his songs and gave young musicians the opportunity to promote their work. Realizing the potential of the new phenomenon of soca music in the late 1970s, he adopted the genre on a number of albums in the years that followed. In 1977 he recorded his most commercially successful song and one of the first big soca hits, "Sugar Bum Bum", which became a big hit especially during the Carnival season.
Kitchener had two marriages and with his second wife he had 4 children. In the late 1990s he was diagnosed with bone marrow cancer and died on 11 February 2000 at Mount Hope Hospital in Port of Spain.