Cab Kaye - Private Life

Private Life

Although born in London, Kaye considered himself African. He married three times; first in 1939 to Theresa Austin, a jazz singer and daughter of a sailor from Barbados. Cab and Theresa often performed together. She and Cab had two daughters, Terri Quaye (born 8 November 1940, Bodmin), Tanya Quaye and a son, Caleb Quaye (born 1948, London). Cab met his second wife, a Nigerian named Evelyn, in the 1960s in Ghana. Together, they moved back to England. After a brief affair in 1973 with Sharon McGowan, a jazz singer, he had a son, Finley Quaye (born 25 March 1974, Edinburgh). Cab Kaye met his son Finley as an adult in 1997 at a concert of Finley's in the rock music venue and cultural centre Paradiso Amsterdam. Three generations - grandfather Caleb Jonas Quaye (Ernest Mope Desmond), Kwamlah Quaye (Cab Kaye) and youngest son Finley Quaye - have all played, at different times, at Glasgow's Barrowlands, Wolverhampton's Wulfrun Hall and London's Cafe de Paris. His third wife, Jeannette, was Dutch. After marrying, he decided to settle in the Netherlands and became a Dutch citizen.

In the 1990s, Kaye was diagnosed with mouth floor cancer. The man who had entertained countless people with his singing lost the ability to speak. Until his death at the age of 78 (13 March 2000) in the Dapperbuurt, Cab Kaye lived in Amsterdam, where he was cremated. His ashes were scattered in the North Sea and in Accra.

Cab Kaye's motto was: "Truth is stranger than f(r)iction (excuse my diction, I walk with a lisp)."