Jamaican dancehall singer Barrington Levy, 57, was recognized for his long and impressive career in the music industry with the Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2021 Caribbean Food & Rum Festival on December 12, 2021, at the Hollywood Arts Park in Hollywood, Florida. Following his 40-minute performance in which he had the crowd dancing to some of his biggest hits, including “Murderer,” “Under Mi Sensi,” “Too Experienced,” “Here I Come,” and “Prison Oval Rock,” Levy received the Lifetime Achievement Award from Oliver Mair, Jamaica’s Consul General for the Southern United States. His song “Better Than Gold” has been featured in the soundtrack of “The Harder They Fall,” a top-10 trending film from Netflix.
Commenting on the award, the Grammy-nominated Levy told his fans at the festival that it was the first thing his country ever gave him and that he appreciated Consul General Mair for presenting it to him.
Levy was born in Clarendon, Jamaica, and has been a reggae and dancehall performer for 45 years. Over the years, he has created more than 35 albums on labels such as VP Records, MCA, Greensleeves, and Tuff Gong. Levy has traveled around the world on tour to the appreciation of his millions of fans in Europe and North America.
In 2015, he was nominated for a Grammy Award for the Best Reggae Album for “Acousticalevy” In 2018, he took to social media to tell his fans he had a “virus.” This was his way of publicizing his new single entitled “Virus,” but his announcement caused some confusion, and he had to return to social media to explain the meaning to his fans. He told an interviewer from Caribbean National Weekly that he was referring to the “love virus” and that “we still need to spread that love.” The song has become one of his most popular releases and collected over one million views in a year.
Caribbean Food & Rum Festival, which featured entertainment by Soca Queen Alison Hinds and the international Third World band in addition to Barrington Levy, had been rescheduled from its original date in September 2021 due to a surge of COVID-19 cases in Florida.
