Vincentians Abroad · Obituary
The Vincentian They Called the Godfather of 2 Tone
Vibert Cornwall left St. Vincent as a young man and became Ray King, the singer the founders of The Specials and The Selecter call their teacher. He died in Coventry at 87, famous in a British city and largely unknown in the country that raised him. This is who he was.
When Lynval Golding of The Specials learned that Vibert Cornwall had died, he did not reach for the language of a fan mourning a favourite singer. He reached for the language of a student burying a teacher. Without this man, Golding said, there would never have been 2 Tone, nor The Specials, nor The Selecter. He called him the godfather of all of them.
Most Vincentians reading that name for the first time this week could be forgiven for asking who he was. Vibert Cornwall left St. Vincent and the Grenadines as a young man in 1961 and never came home to live. He built his entire life, and a considerable legacy, in the English Midlands city of Coventry, under a name his own countrymen never had reason to learn: Ray King. He died there on 20 July, aged 87.
He is claimed today by Coventry as one of its own. It is worth Vincentians understanding that before Coventry could claim him, St. Vincent made him.
From Kingstown to the cold
Vibert Edmund Cornwall was born in St. Vincent and the Grenadines in October 1938. He was the brother of Reginald Cornwall, who would himself be honoured with an MBE. In 1961, at 22, he joined the great wave of Caribbean migrants who crossed the Atlantic to a Britain that had invited them to come and work, and often gave them a colder welcome than the weather.
He landed first in Northampton. Two years later he moved to Coventry, by his own account because he had been told it was the place to become a singer. That decision, made by a young Vincentian with more nerve than connections, would reshape the music of a British city and, through it, reach charts and stages around the world.
The reinvention was almost literal. He took singing lessons from a local teacher who, the story goes, listened once, handed his money back, and told him he had no need of lessons. Around 1966 he joined a group called Suzi and the Kingsize Kings, adopted the stage name Ray King, and the band was renamed around him as The Ray King Soul Band. Vibert Cornwall of St. Vincent had become Ray King of Coventry.
The bigger draw than the Rolling Stones
What followed reads like tall tale, except that the people of Coventry have spent decades confirming it.
The Ray King Soul Band became one of the most formidable live acts in the Midlands. Coventry music historian Pete Chambers, who founded the city’s Music Museum, records that the band once drew a bigger crowd to Coventry’s Locarno ballroom than the Rolling Stones did. In the late 1960s the group won a six month residency at the Playboy Club in London. A live album, recorded at the Playboy Club and released on a CBS subsidiary in 1968, captured the act at full power.
The names that shared stages with King in those years are the names of an era. Accounts from Coventry’s music historians place Jimi Hendrix jamming with the band, with Paul McCartney joining on another occasion, and list appearances alongside Ike and Tina Turner, Marvin Gaye, Otis Redding, Solomon Burke and Stevie Wonder. Chambers compared King’s command of a stage to James Brown, describing a performer who could control a room with a single look or a small movement of the arm.
He controlled the stage with just one look, one little movement of the arm.
Pete Chambers, Coventry Music Museum
For a Black Caribbean migrant to reach those stages in 1960s Britain, in the teeth of the racism of the period, was no small thing. He did it as a Vincentian.
How one Vincentian seeded a whole genre
King’s fame as a performer is only half the story, and for the history of music it is the lesser half. His deeper influence came from what he built around himself, and who passed through it.
When the Soul Band wound down, King formed a group called Pharaohs Kingdom. Into it he brought several musicians he had come to know, among them a young guitarist named Lynval Golding. That group evolved into another, Night Trane, which drew in the guitarist Neol Davies and a keyboard player named Jerry Dammers.
Hold those three names. Jerry Dammers would leave to found The Specials, the band that launched the 2 Tone label and the entire movement. Lynval Golding would be beside him as a founding member. Neol Davies would leave to form The Selecter. A fourth man in that Coventry circle, the bassist Charley Anderson, ran a youth music project with King in the basement of a centre on Lower Holyhead Road, the collective that Vincentians may recognise from Neville Staple’s tribute by its sound system name, Jah Baddis. Anderson too became a founding member of The Selecter.
The pattern is unmistakable once you see it. The two bands that defined 2 Tone, The Specials and The Selecter, were assembled in large part from musicians who first learned their craft in bands led by, or built alongside, a man from St. Vincent. He did not play on the famous records. He taught and gathered the people who made them.
The line from Ray King to 2 Tone
- Lynval Golding, The Specials. Played in King’s Pharaohs Kingdom before helping found the band.
- Jerry Dammers, The Specials. In Night Trane with King before leaving to create the 2 Tone label and The Specials.
- Neol Davies, The Selecter. Also passed through Night Trane before forming his band.
- Charley Anderson, The Selecter. Ran the Jah Baddis youth music project with King.
- Neville Staple, The Specials. Traces his early music career to the Jah Baddis days with King, “long before the Specials.”
2 Tone fused Jamaican ska with British punk energy and made racially integrated bands a statement in a divided Britain. The people who built it came up through a Vincentian’s rooms.
There is even a plausible thread from King directly to the ska sound itself. One Coventry account describes King taking a band to Tunisia in the early days and returning fascinated with the ska rhythms of a Toots and the Maytals number, wanting to push his group fully toward ska while Dammers resisted, before the paths split. It is one historian’s telling and we present it as that, but it points at something real. This music did not come from nowhere. It came, in part, through him.
The man who kept opening doors
What lifts King’s story above music trivia is what he did with his standing once the hits stopped.
He moved into management, but he never left the community that had formed in Coventry’s West Indian population. He ran a Saturday music school. He worked with young offenders and took quiet pride when they came back years later to thank him. Company records list him as a director of the Coventry West Indian Association and later of a body called Community Partners for Learning. Golding, in his 2019 recollection, put it plainly, calling King the foundation, the roots, the man they all learned from.
Coventry has honoured him for it. In 2010 Coventry University awarded him an honorary doctorate of letters, recognising both his music and his community work, the same distinction the university later gave to his protégé Jerry Dammers. In 2012 his name was set on the Wall of Fame at the city’s 2 Tone Village, part of the Coventry Music Museum. The city that he chose at 24 has spent his later years making sure it would not forget him.
A claim St. Vincent can make
Here is the gentle challenge his passing leaves for his birthplace.
Coventry has a museum, a wall, a doctorate and a shelf of tributes for Ray King. St. Vincent and the Grenadines, until this week, had for the most part forgotten it ever knew a Vibert Cornwall. That is the ordinary fate of those who leave young and make their name far away. It does not have to be the final word.
The facts allow us a legitimate pride. A Vincentian stood on a British stage with Hendrix and McCartney. A Vincentian assembled the rooms in which 2 Tone was born. A Vincentian is called the godfather of a movement that put integrated Black and white bands at the top of the British charts and told a divided country something it needed to hear. That the man himself became Ray King does not erase that he began as one of ours.
He left in 1961 and did not return. Six decades later, the least his birthplace can do is learn his name before it says goodbye.
Vibert Edmund Cornwall, known to the world as Ray King, singer, bandleader, teacher and son of St. Vincent and the Grenadines, died in Coventry, England, on 20 July 2026, aged 87. He is survived by his family and by every band that came up through his rooms.
Sourcing and notes. This account draws on BBC News, the Coventry Telegraph, NME and the memorial reporting of the St Vincent Times and Searchlight, together with the historical writing of Coventry music chroniclers Pete Chambers and Pete Clemons. Some details of the 1960s touring years survive only in those historians’ accounts and in King’s own later interviews, and are presented as recollection rather than documented record. Sources differ on points of detail: his arrival in Britain is variously given as 1961 with a move to Coventry around 1963, and the year of his Coventry University doctorate is reported as both 2010 and 2013, with the university’s own records and contemporaneous accounts favouring 2010. Where accounts conflict, this newspaper has said so rather than choose. Vincypowa News welcomes contact from any family or associates of Vibert Cornwall in St. Vincent and the Grenadines who can add to the record of his early life here, at editor@vincypowanews.com.