Ted Mason – Deep in Your Jungle – Mi5 Recordings (Universal Music Group)

I play bass, guitars, produce, arrange strings, and of course, vocals and songwriting. The song is about my Father, he was British, my mom Nicaraguan. We grew up in the 60’s before civil rights was real. He was the man who would be King in the family. He was also the man that traveled, that helped the British Empire conquer. He was very lonely, he was very much like Henry Morton Stanley who helped coin the bigoted title, “Deepest Darkest Africa.”

The key to England colonizing the world would be in the class system that did not allow people like my father to prosper, but they could go to the farthest reaches of the empire, and they would be King, because they were English, white, and ran things in India, Burma, half of Africa etc.

But, God forbid if you married a WOG! You could never go back to England. Well… my Dad did marry a Wog, my mother was from Central America. Made for an unhappy relationship with England and his parents. so that is what the lyrics are about, my Dad and Henry Morton Stanley.

Blind is the alley
under the church spire
HM Stanley was born

a fatherless child
a workhouse escape
shipped out for a
blue new world

he would be king
would you be king

when you get there
what will you take
what did you share for you love

deep in your jungle
did you find your happiness
what you have found black
may just be the light you have missed
one door is opened the one you closed.

If not for his country
Merchant and Ivory
self made road
to the crown

An African story
rubber to glory
all for a pound of gold

– Ted Mason