Walter Ferguson (singer-songwriter)

In an attempt to recover this lost treasure, in January 2018 his son Peck Ferguson and Niels Werdenberg launched “The Walter Ferguson Tape Hunt”, a worldwide project aimed at rescuing all of Mr Gavitt's forgotten songs, in preparation for his 100th birthday celebrations in May 2019.

In 2017, he was awarded the Patrimonio Cultural Inmaterial "Emilia Prieto Tugores" prize.

Despite playing a huge part in his life, music has never been the main source of income for Mr Gavitt. Contrary to his mother's predictions, he worked as a farmer throughout his life to support himself and the large family he had with his wife Julia Drummond, a childhood friend and neighbour, who died in 2016 at the age of 87. Together they had ten children and eight grandchildren.

In 2013, the annual Festival International de Calypso Walter Ferguson was established in his honour in Cahuita.

Though Ferguson had already achieved legendary status on the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica before "Babylon" and his second CD "Dr Bombodee" (2004), their publication rescued him from oblivion and gave him back his status of calypsonian.

At last, "Babylon" was released in 2003, and Ferguson's work was finally recognised and appreciated at a larger scale. The CD consists of thirteen original tunes with only Ferguson accompanying himself on his guitar. It became a national and international success not only for its witty lyrics, but also for the unique recording process it went through.

It wasn't until 2002, with the help of the label Papaya Music, that Ferguson could record his first high-quality CD.

In 1986, the label Indica produced his second vinyl called "Calypsos del Caribe de Costa Rica" (Calypsos from the Caribbean Costa Rica) which included different songs, as well as some lyrics in English and a short biography of Ferguson written by the local historian Paula Palmer.

Already a local legend, in 1982 Ferguson had the opportunity to record his first vinyl “Mr Gavitt: Costa Rican calypso”, a collection of some of his most famous songs produced by the American musicologist Michael Williams under the Smithsonian Folkways Recordings label. The album also included an English translation of the lyrics and a short biography. However, due to its poor sound quality, the album never found distribution in Costa Rica.

The technical limitations encouraged him to come up with ingenious solutions, such as the lo-fi overdubs he described in an interview: "I have two cassettes, I sing on one and when I'm done I copy it back and put another one in the recorded, so when I sing behind that, you hear two voices." He kept producing his home-recorded tapes from the late 1970s to the end of the 1990s, when he decided to retire from his music career and only perform occasionally.

Walter "Gavitt" Ferguson Byfield (born 7 May 1919) is a Panamanian-born Costa Rican calypso singer-songwriter also known as "Mr Gavitt" or "Segundo", in his hometown of Cahuita.

Walter Ferguson was born in Guabito, Panama. on 7 May 1919, the oldest of six children. His father, Melsha Lorenzo Ferguson, was a Jamaican farmer for the United Fruit Company, and his mother, Sarah Byfield Dykin, a Costa Rican seamstress and baker of Jamaican descent. When Walter was two, his parents moved from Panama to the small fishing village of Cahuita in the Costa Rican province of Limón, where he ended up spending the rest of his life, almost never leaving it.