Trinidad and To­ba­go's mu­sic fra­ter­ni­ty is mourn­ing the death of Hawthorn "King Welling­ton" Quashie who passed away at the age of 86.

Born in Good­wood, To­ba­go, King Welling­ton was yes­ter­day re­mem­bered for his im­mense pas­sion for mu­sic.

In the 1950's, he came to Trinidad to fur­ther his mu­si­cal am­bi­tions. Ac­cord­ing to the To­ba­go House of As­sem­bly's Di­vi­sion of Tourism, Cul­ture, An­tiq­ui­ties & Trans­porta­tion, he would en­roll in the T&T Po­lice Ser­vice in 1959 when some­one stole his gui­tar.

How­ev­er, in the 1960's he would turn his at­ten­tion ful­ly to mu­sic where he joined the Julius Chaloff Mu­sic School. Ac­cord­ing to a state­ment on the Di­vi­sion's Face­book page yes­ter­day, "Con­vinced that ca­lyp­so could re-emerge in the world stage, he de­vel­oped an in­no­v­a­tive and ex­per­i­men­tal ap­proach, even coin­ing the term "Rus­so Funk" and his cre­ative cat­a­logue dur­ing that era un­doubt­ed­ly con­tributed to the evo­lu­tion of ca­lyp­so and so­ca mu­sic in Trinidad and To­ba­go."

The Di­vi­sion fur­ther high­light­ed some of his clas­si­cal songs which in­clud­ed Steel & Brass, Ms. Mc­Carthy Par­ty, To­ba­go Gal, Quelvis, Take Yuh Time and the so­ca parang "Fire One."

He sang in var­i­ous tents in­clud­ing Ca­lyp­so Re­vue and Young Brigade and he was al­so a mem­ber of the Trin­ba­go Uni­fied Ca­lyp­so Or­gan­i­sa­tion (TU­CO).

King Welling­ton would take the lo­cal genre in­ter­na­tion­al­ly with per­for­mances across the Unit­ed States across four decades with his band King Welling­ton and The Earth Peeples. The Di­vi­sion said, in 2022, at the age of 83, he was still per­form­ing with his band and in Au­gust of that year they opened for leg­endary Amer­i­can singer Jim­my Buf­fet.

In 2019, TU­CO ho­n­oured him with the long and dis­tin­guished ser­vice to ca­lyp­so award.