Sing me a song about September; online voting available
Shari Williams
The National September Celebrations are right around the corner so expect to hear a number of Belizean songs on the airwaves around this time of the year. And as the National Celebrations Committee gets its national song competition going, the public gets the opportunity to help decide which of the songs best depict Belize. The contest will culminate on Saturday August twentieth but until then, you can go online and vote for the songs you like. Shari Williams, Communications Officer for NICH, says this year promises to be twice as festive.
Shari Williams, Communications Officer, NICH
“This year like for the past three years we’ve been having the National Song Competition. The whole reasoning behind the song competition was to encourage more Belizean Artists was to produce both patriotic and carnival songs. For several years now we’ve seen songs used in the Carnival Road March which has been mainly imported from outside and the objective of this has really been accomplished over the last couple of years because there have been more and more Belizean songs. We had approximately about forty applications or forty entries being sent in. We had to actually turn back some people because of the deadline, but the songs that were entered this year, we were amazed by the high quality, and they were really good. We had to do a process where we shortlisted them, so out of the forty entries we have ten vying for the patriotic song of the year, ten vying for the carnival song of the year and four junior entries this year. As well we are going to choose a carnival road march song of the year which will be the song that’s played the most on the radio, in the carnival road march and all the rest of it. Choosing the winners will be a three part fold, one was the short listing, we’ve done that. Second we’re having an online voting section where we’re encouraging Belizeans or anybody to go online at myantionalsong.bz, listen to all the songs, dance to them, vote on them and you could even comment. The third part will be a live performance at the memorial park this Saturday.”
The live performance starts at seven p.m. and is free of cost. The winners of the three categories will be selected at the end of the night.
