Music: Calypso Boom

Trinidad, British island off the northeast coast of South America, is a hot mixture of bloods, French, Spanish, Negro, Carib, Hindu, Chinese. Once a year, on the two days before Lent, Trinidad goes crazy with a carnival of rum-drinking, parades, musicmaking, mummery—blacks painted or masked as whites, whites as blacks. During carnival, Trinidad characters bearing such names as The Lion, Atilla the Hun, The Caresser, The Growler live high and merrily. They are the Calypsonians of the island, who compose, play and sing the Trinidad music known as Calypso.* Their songs, whose jerky rhythms and insinuating tunes suggest Africa and South America as well as the West Indies, tell of local and world news events, celebrate such universal subjects as women and drink.

Tourists long ago discovered Calypso, found it fun to pay a few dollars to have themselves described in an impromptu ballad. For nearly five years, Columbia and Decca have recorded Calypso songs in Trinidad, but U. S. enthusiasts could obtain discs only by hunting for them in New York’s Harlem. By last week, with four midtown Manhattan shops (Liberty, Center, Marconi and Symphony) carrying them in stock Calypsos sold well to an eager public.

A typical Calypsonian inspiration was the visit of Franklin D. Roosevelt to Trinidad. Hammering long words into his melody regardless of accent (a Calypso trait), Atilla the Hun — a sober young father, mostly white, of nine children by his Negro wife — sings on a Decca disc:

Oh, we were privileged to see the democratic

President of the great republic,

With his charming and genial personality

And his wonderful urbanity. . . .

King Edward VIII’s abdication was approved in a dozen Calypso songs, one (by The Gorilla) voicing a comfortable Calypso philosophy:

Believe me, friends, if I were King I’d marry any woman and give her a ring,

I wouldn’t give a damn what the people say

So long as she can wash, cook, and dingolay.

One of the best current Calypso tunes, sung in a rich British-West Indian accent by The Caresser. a tenor, is Edward the VIII, which has a fuller Empire flavor:

Oh what a sad disappointment Was that endured by the British Government . . . On the tenth of December we heard the talk

That he give the throne to the Duke of York. . . .

Most popular Calypso singer is The Lion (real name: Hubert Raphael Charles), a young black buck who was taken to Manhattan in 1936 by Ralph Perez, successively a Calypso specialist for Columbia and Decca. The Lion, however, proved the most censorable of the Calypsonians, all of whose records Mr. Perez must submit to British officials before they may be sold in Trinidad. The Lion’s share of the 1937 carnival was his song Netty-Netty, voted the most popular by the public, but banned on the island. On sale in the U. S., its words are allegedly unprintable, and at all but a few points effectively inaudible, or in Caribbean patois. But verbal understanding is not necessary to convince hearers that it is a saga of a rollicking Trinidad wench.

*Calypso was a legendary sea nymph who delayed Odysseus for seven years of his wanderings. Few Trinidadians have heard of her, believe that their Calypso is a native word meaning old French & Spanish music.