Pats’ Chung makes big hits like reggae star mom

She had a voice that danced like sunshine through warm Sunday mornings, wafting so sweet in her Jamaican church that Sophia George’s friend said it must be heard throughout the land. And because Sophia’s friend knew someone looking for a singer, she insisted Sophia go to the audition. So on the prescribed day, Sophia arrived at the studio and met a Chinese man with a Jamaican accent. He picked a song for her to sing, “Girlie Girlie,” and she sang a few notes until the man said to stop.

He had heard enough. This would be his singer

How could Sophia know she would one day marry this man? And that they would move to California, and that the middle of their three children would grow up to be a football player? And that her boy, Patrick Chung(notes) – fierce and relentless on the field and gentle away from it – would become in many ways the heart of the New England Patriots 75 Vince Wilfork jersey defense?

She never imagined the singing would be anything more than a lark, just a chance for her to share her voice. Then “Girlie Girlie” was pressed onto vinyl and the record started to sell. And sell. And sell until it was the No. 1 song in her native country, and requests rolled in for her to perform internationally – first England, then Holland, Germany, the United States and even Japan. Suddenly it seemed – in 1985 – everyone wanted to hear “Girlie Girlie.”

“I was invited to go to London and do ‘Top of the Pops’,” she says over the phone with a bit of wonder still in her voice. At this moment she is sitting in her office at a Southern California company that does background checks on doctors and all of this seems so long ago. “It was a time of my life I absolutely enjoyed.”

Then it was over. After she and Ronald Chung married and had Patriots kids jersey , the children’s lives gradually took over her own. Eventually, they decided, if they wanted their kids to go to college in the United States, they should probably move here. And in 1996 they did, leaving the music behind.

“You know what it is like in the music business,” Ronald says.”You have a big hit and then nothing. Sometimes it’s just luck I guess.”

Patrick Chung sits in a Red Robin restaurant located in an outdoor mall near Gillette Stadium. Just 9 years old when the family left, he knows little about his mother’s life in Jamaica. He’s seen pictures and heard her songs. He can sing many of them. But he was too young to know the travelling life, the bands, the DJs and nightclub performances. By the time he was old enough to grasp what his parents did for work, they had moved – first to Miami and then to Rancho Cucamonga, a suburb southeast of Los Angeles in San Bernardino County.

But now as he is rising as a star with New England, as he becomes a bigger and bigger deal in a city where Reebok NFL Jerseys professional athletes are revered, it is the lessons of her career that he does understand. “Be humble,” she always told him. You never know when it all might end.