The King Shakey story began one night in February 1968 when the 7-year-old challenged his elder brother, Fred, to a competition to determine the Calypso King of Hill Sixty, the small hill in Layou, Dominica, where the James family lived. Fred won handily. The event established a tradition, and for several years thereafter, the family staged the Hill Sixty Calypso King Competition. Suffice it to say that Shakey never lost another such competition, beating out challenges by his siblings and other relatives – including another famous Dominican calypsonian, his uncle, De Rabbit. 

Shakey came to the Dominican public’s attention in the spring of 1973 when he and his fellow budding calypsonians at the Dominica Grammar School (“DGS”), Haxey, Lip-Lip, Monty, and Rojo, convinced teachers Lucia Blaize and Alwyn Bully to allow them to stage during class time what they dubbed the Lenten Season Calypso Tent. Radio Dominica announcer, Daniel “Papa Dee” Caudieron, got wind of the “tent” and visited on two occasions to record some songs which he then played on his Teenage Tempo program. Shakey contributed two songs to those recordings: World Crisis and Political Problem. The following year, the high school’s drama club decided to organize the DGS Calypso Monarch Competition. Shakey and his friends competed, with Haxey taking the honors as the first-ever DGS Calypso Monarch. In 1975, however, Shakey won the competition, a feat he repeated in 1976, the year in which he also won the first-ever Secondary Schools Calypso Monarch Competition. Following that victory, the DGS Drama Club announced that it would sponsor Shakey for the 1977 Dominica Calypso Monarch Competition. Michael Bruney, Alwyn Bully and Einstar LeBlanc formed a management team – which eventually became known as King Shakey Promotions – to assist the young singer, playing a significant part in enabling him, in February 1977 (at the age of 16), to set his first two aforementioned records. The following year, Shakey was crowned first-ever Independence Calypso Monarch, and then in 1979 – at the age of 18 – became the youngest-ever Dominica Calypso Monarch. To this date, the records Shakey set are still standing. 

1979 proved to be quite a year for the young singer. In addition to performing at concerts alongside some of the major personalities in Caribbean calypso music at the time, he traveled to Antigua to represent Dominica in the Caribbean Calypso Monarch Competition. Appalled at what they saw as open biasness in favor of the two Antiguan competitors, Shakey and all but one of the calypsonians from the other Caribbean islands refused to participate. They also formed what St. Vincent’s De Man Age dubbed the Caribbean Revolutionary Calypso Association, naming Shakey as the spokesperson. Later that year, Shakey was invited by both Mighty Sparrow and Lord Kitchener to join their respective calypso tents in Trinidad and Tobago. He accepted Sparrow’s invitation and moved to Trinidad where he performed with the Sparrow’s Young Brigade Calypso Tent during the carnival season and worked for a music producer during the off season. While in Trinidad, he recorded David, a song relating the devastation visited upon Dominica by Hurricane David on August 29, 1979. The song was well received; it climbed to the top of several Caribbean music charts and received extensive airplay on BBC Radio London. By late 1980, Shakey was at the top of his game. Not only had he performed in almost all of the Caribbean islands, but he had contracted to record his first full-length album and was carded to share the billing with Trinidad’s Crazy at a concert in early 1981. But that was not to be. 

Following a successful tour of St. Martin/Maarten with fellow calypsonians Zeye and Spider in late 1980, Shakey visited Dominica to rest before returning to Trinidad. While in Dominica, he attended some services at the St. Joseph Seventh-day Adventist Church, and, convinced that performing as a calypsonian was contrary to the will of God, retired from the calypso circuit and became a high school teacher. However, Shakey’s retirement from the calypso circuit by no means signaled the end of his involvement in the art form. He continued to write calypsos, penning songs for Tronada, Spider, Haxey, Brown Sugar and Swinging Janice. In fact, during the 1981 calypso season, Shakey’s songs were sung by the Calypso Monarch (Tronada), First Runner-up (Spider), Third Runner-up (Haxey), DGS Calypso Monarch (Brown Sugar), and DGS First Runner-up (Swinging Janice). Later that year, Shakey returned to the stage under a new name (Edward Schaeker), performing at churches and religious events, and writing and recording radio commercial jingles. 

In July 1983, Shakey left Dominica for St. Thomas, United States Virgin Islands, to embark upon business and education studies at the University of the Virgin Islands (“UVI”). The move proved very beneficial to the young musician’s career. Within one day of landing in St. Thomas, he had acquired a new guitar and was back into the music business. Over the next two years, he performed at churches and church-sponsored events, and continued to write calypsos for students performing in the annual UVI Calypso Monarch Competition. He also did some acting in musicals, his most noteworthy role being that of Calypsonian in Dennis Knight’s Life Cycles of Caribbean Man. He also entered broadcasting, first as a newscaster at WIBS FM98, and then at WGOD-FM where he eventually rose to the office of station manager.  

Musically, in December 1985, Shakey joined the religious band Zion Melodies as a vocalist and guitarist (bass and rhythm). Essentially, the band played “soft” religious music, hardly venturing into Caribbean rhythms. In 1987, he took a leave of absence from the band to complete the Bachelor of Theology Equivalency program at Andrews University in Berrien Springs, Michigan. While there, he had what he terms a revelation. He describes it thus: “I was in my room one Sabbath afternoon listening to beautiful ballet and classical music on WAUS Radio. It then hit me: here I was, a man from the Caribbean, a man born in Colihaut who grew up in Colihaut, St. Joseph and Layou, sitting there listening to ballet and classical and refusing to sing and write Caribbean music.” 

Shakey promptly picked up his guitar and wrote Vive Pour Jesu, a cadence-lypso song making a plea for its hearers to turn their lives to Jesus. Returning to St. Thomas later that year, he recorded the song as one of his three contributions to the Double Trouble for the Devil album co-produced with his friend and former St. Thomas calypsonian, Ulric “Irari” Ferrari. His two other contributions were It Takes Courage (a reggae-calypso mix) and I Wonder a song that chastised mankind for our warlike qualities. He was accompanied on all three songs by his new group, The Gospel Shakers. In 1991, while still based in St. Thomas, Shakey teamed up with his New York based uncle, Ignatius Alexander (former lead singer and guitarist of the Bronx, New York, based group, The 10:15, and singer of the popular song, I Am The Vine) to record Optimistic Wanderers, an album featuring the singer-songwriters’ original compositions and a remake of I Wonder. The album was released days before the outbreak of the Gulf War. Within weeks, I Wonder had climbed to the top of the religious music charts in the United States Virgin Islands and Shakey was in much demand at concerts and religious – and even secular – events. Buoyed by the success of Optimistic Wanderers, Shakey and Ignatius formed the all-Dominican group, Lechayim, to perform and record religious and “conscious” music. In addition to the two singer-songwriters, the group consisted of Shakey’s brother, Fred; his friend from St. Joseph, Dominica, Charles Hillarie; and eventually his uncle, De Rabbit. The group’s 1993 album, To Life, contained three hits – Sing a Song (which some people claim is Shakey’s best song ever), Jesus, the Strength of My Life, and (With a Smile) I’ll be There (which featured Ignatius in the vocal spotlight). Like I Wonder before it, Sing a Song climbed to the top of the religious music charts in the United States Virgin Islands. Meanwhile, (With a Smile) I’ll be There received acclaim and radio airplay from countries as far away as Taiwan. The album completely sold out, with the producers scrambling to press additional copies to satisfy demand. Indeed, the fact that the group was often performing at various events significantly helped increase sales. Shakey has fond memories of the group’s first gig: 

We were playing at Millbrook meadows at a function hosted by the Poughkeepsie Area Chamber of Commerce. Charlie North was MC.   After the warm-ups were over, Charlie took the stage and announced, “Ladies and gentlemen, from right here in Dutchess County, we present Lechayim.” Understand that Charlie is Jewish and so he pronounced Lechayim with the correct Hebrew emphases. I could see the shock register on the faces of the audience as, instead of seeing a Jewish group, they saw four black guys hop on stage and start belting our Bob Marley’s Time Will Tell. It was a gas!

The group performed so creditably that for the next several years Lechayim headlined the annual Millbrook Meadows Caribbean Party. Alas, when Shakey – by then a lawyer – accepted a law professorship at Texas Tech University School of Law in Lubbock, Texas, in 2001, Lechayim experienced an inevitable death. Ignatius returned to doing solo gigs while Shakey formed two groups – the “secular, conscious-music” group, King Shakey & The Banned, and the strictly religious music group, The Wholly Banned. Both groups were identical in membership with members coming from Dominica, Trinidad and Tobago, the Bahamas, and Texas. To this day, the groups’ focus is Caribbean music. 

In 2003, Shakey reunited briefly with his friend, Tronada, to write and record the CD, Why I Come Back. Tronada returned to Dominica where he performed the Shakey composition, Hope Springs Eternal, in the 2003 Dominica Calypso Monarch Competition. Alas, he did not make it past the semi-finals.