The Love of Rose’s sweet melody makes Calypso History
“Veteran Calypsonian Calypso Rose has won the World Album of the Year award at the Victoire de la Musique award ceremony in France.”
Rose McCartha Linda Sandy Lewis, is the undisputed Calypso Queen. Rose’s “Far from Home” platinum-selling album was released by the Because Music label on June 3, 2016. “Far from Home” competed against Dance/Electronic group Acid Arab with their album “Music of France” and Malian singer/songwriter Rokia Traore with her album “Born So.”
As of 2017, Calypso Rose created Caribbean music history as she won the award for World Album of the Year which is considered the French equivalent of a Grammy award (Blood 2017). She is the most decorated calypsonian in Trinidad and Tobago’s history, and was awarded the Trinidad and Tobago Gold Humming Bird Medal in 2011, an award given to Trinidadians “for loyal and devoted service beneficial to the state in any field, or acts of gallantry (Jamaica Observer 2017).”
Upon receiving her Victoire de la Musique award she said the fans “have kept me going with the beautiful music and the vibrations I give them.”
Music is a cultural phenomenon. It is a form of inter-human communication in which humans organise, non-verbal sound transferred primarily through affective and gestural patterns of cognition (Tagg 2002). Music provides entertainment and serves to relieve tension and protest the structures that exist in society. Calypso is an integral part of carnival celebrations and is a syncretic popular art-form that offers commentary on the socio-political and economic issues of Trinidad and Tobago, and in so doing, recording experiences of the nation state (Phillips 2009). Calypso is derived from a West African tradition of social commentary whereby praise, blame or derision was employed and conveyed via song or folk tales (Rohlehr 1983).
History of Calypso
In Trinidad, Calypso was born out of complex song and dance, social conflict and censorship which had pervaded the colonies from their inception. African music often served the purpose of social control and permitted criticism of one’s leaders at specific times, in particular contexts through the media of song and story (Hill 1983). As such Calypso music emerged as a response “to a cultural climate that demanded creative modes of expression that could both resist and record the historical and political changes taking place in Trinidad (Saunders 2007).”
Mission of the Chantwell
The Calinda/ Stick-fighting tradition became a staple in Trinidad, developing its own rules, rituals, coded language and style. Each stick-fighting street band often represented different groups and were the result of the social processes of displacement and urbanisation with their various conflicts and cultural processes. Each band had its lead singer or chantwell, “whose task was to harangue the stick-fighters into action, to sustain the courage of his champion and to pour scorn on the rival group (Hill 1983).” The spirit of rebellion which was a key ingredient of the Calinda/ Stick-fighting was heavily legislated and prohibited. Consequently, the Africans had to find new means to express themselves (Saunders 2007).
Cowley (1996) chronicled this suppression of freedom and culture by noting that by 1896,
“Legislation and its enforcement by the police had reduced the diameter element to a rump… Canboulay (Carnival) had been stopped, bands of more than ten persons carrying sticks were prohibited, pierrots were obliged to obtain police licenses, pisse-en-lit and transvestism were banned…”
The hostile rejection and desire to curb Afro-Caribbean culture in the colonies hastened. As a result of the sanctions by the government, the chantwell honed his oratorical skill, becoming the ‘voice of the people,’ raising awareness to their audiences.
The Chantwell: on “a constant quest for a more splendid language an excellence of tongue…”
The language of calypso remained French patois throughout the nineteenth century. Though formal education was being disseminated in Trinidad by the colonial masters, many children were neglected. That is “broken” English speakers would be taught Standard English but the teachers ignored the students whose first language was not English.
The struggle for language was painful. Before the Patois-speaking pupil could master speaking or writing English, he had to relate the new language to what was familiar. Many pupils were intrigued by the sound rather than the sense of the word but education meant self-improvement and mastery over word (Hill 1983). By 1920, calypso music grew to an art form that was able to teach in ways the written text could not and reach a much larger audience regardless of literacy. The “Word” or “Call” by the calypsonian ranges from a prayer, an invocation, mantra, decree and an affirmation that invoke verbal deeds, equivalent to mechanical acts (Phillips 2009).
Calypso has persisted because calypsonians have an acute sense of his own freedom and awareness; they know that they remain the “fierce guardians of independent, grass-rooted opinion who assume the right to dialogue” with and about the social structure (Rohlehr 2013).
Three main Functions of Calypso:
1. A source of collective memory
Calypso is “an invaluable medium for maintaining a critical perspective on society by keeping contributions and controversies alive for future generations to learn from, borrow and ultimately revise.” — Patricia J. Saunders
Thus it has been both a chronicle and a form of positive reconstruction of our past. For instance reference to slavery in the music is reconstructing the past as a lesson. In a similar way, music reconstructs slavery and colonialism and chronicles the day to day lived experience of the peoples of the region and their immense fortitude and interaction with the world (Hinds 2010).
2. An affirmation of identity
“Arises out of the unique ability of music seemingly to create a kind of spontaneous collective identity or facilitate the investment of people’s psychological energies.” — Ray Pratt
This is a very significant role of Calypso in the quest for reclaiming history and identity given the erasure of the Caribbean people’s identity during the period of enslavement and colonialism. A media in which the Caribbean people share their celebration, pain, protests, satire, praise and blame. Recovering and connecting with their past and holding those past empires accountable for their crimes.
3. A form of resistance
“It emerged as a cultural weapon that yielded tremendous sway within the general audiences of the region.”— Patricia J. Saunders
By highlighting inherent inequalities and oppression the music becomes the collective resistance that rebukes the oppressor!
According to Pratt (1990) “political” or “protest” music is located in the struggle between the dominant groups and the dominated ones where the protest musicians “oppose the exploitation and oppression exercised by dominant elites and members of dominant groups.” Thus both popular culture and politics need one another yet are unable to co-exist peacefully because of the continuous struggle to redefine and change overtime.
“The music, therefore, becomes part of the larger cultural and political resistance out of which notions of freedom and identity emerge.” —Ray Pratt
The Landmark case of “Rum and Coca-Cola”
The year was 1945, the Andrews Sisters shot their way to the number one spot on the Billboard charts in the US, where they remained for ten weeks with a bouncy calypso called “Rum and Coca-Cola”.
“The Andrews Sisters, and much of the world, didn’t know that the calypso about Trinidadian women ‘working for the Yankee dollar’ was really about prostitution. They didn’t know that Morey Amsterdam, an American actor who claimed to have written the calypso while he was in Trinidad entertaining US troops at the naval base, had really snatched it from the Victory calypso tent, where calypsonians performed during the Carnival season (Jacob 2011).”
Lord Invader filed a copyright infringement case in New York, along with Lionel Belasco, who arranged the calypso. WE WON!
This case sums up calypso history in a nutshell: witty calypsonians “rebelling against foreigners trying to rob them of their culture, tackling colonialism with double entendre that was only understood within the culture of calypso, and commenting on the social and political issues of the day (Jacob 2011).”
The sounds and songs of the Caribbean guides the direction of our people. Just as slaves and indentured labourers working in the fields depended on the songs to fortify and give then strength so too do we today. The technologies for producing sound may have changed but it remains a representation of us and our experiences. Calypso fictions and narratives, fantasies and commentaries, venture into important areas of social discourse and offers us ways to seriously examine ourselves.
As The Queen of the Caribbean music puts it, “My purpose as a calypsonian has always been about uplifting people, and enriching life…” — Calypso Rose
References
Blood, Peter. 2017. “Calypso Rising High With Queen Rose”. The Trinidad And Tobago Guardian. http://www.guardian.co.tt/life/2017-02-11/calypso-rising-high-with-queen-rose.
Calypso Rose Wins World Album Of The Year Award. 2017. Video. https://www.facebook.com/calypsorosediva/videos/vb.785799364789449/1238326796203368/?type=2&theater.
Cowley, John. 1996. Carnival, Canboulay, And Calypso. Cambridge [England]: Cambridge University Press.
Hill, Errol. 1983. ‘The History Of Carnival’. In The Social And Economic Impact Of Carnival. St. Augustine, Trinidad: The Institute of Social and Economic Research, The University of the West Indies.
Hinds, David. 2010. ‘A Mailman To Make Government Understand: The Calypsonian (Chalkdust) As Political Opposition In The Caribbean’. Music And Politics IV (2). doi:10.3998/mp.9460447.0004.204.
Jacob, Debbie. 2011. “What Calypso Means To The Caribbean”. Caribbean Beat. http://caribbean-beat.com/issue-107/what-calypso-means-caribbean#axzz4Z5MygJSh.
Jamaica Observer,. 2017. “Calypso Rose Wins World Music Award In France”. http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/news/Calypso-Rose-wins-World-Music-Award-in-France.
Paquet, Sandra Pouchet, Patricia Joan Saunders, and Stephen Stuempfle. 2007. Music, Memory, Resistance. Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle.
Phillips, Everard M. 2009. The Political Calypso. Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago: Personal Power Unlimited.
Pratt, Ray. 1990. Rhythm and Resistance: Explorations in the Political Uses of Popular Music. New York: Praeger Publishers.
Rohlehr, Gordon. 2008. ‘Calypso, Literature And West Indian Cricket: Era Of Dominance’. Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal 6 (1). http://scholarlyrepository.miami.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1148&context=anthurium.
Rohlehr, Gordon. 2013. ‘Calypso, Education And Community In Trinidad And Tobago From The 1940S To 2011’. Tout Moun: Caribbean Journal Of Cultural Studies 2 (1).
Rohlehr, Gordon. 1983. ‘An Introduction To The History Of Calypso’. In The Social And Economic Impact Of Carnival. St. Augustine, Trinidad: Institute of Social and Economic Research, University of the West Indies.
Saunders, Patricia J. 2007. ‘Mapping The Roots/Routes Of Calypso In Caribbean Literary And Cultural Traditions’. In Music, Memory, Resistance, 1st ed., xvi-xlii. Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle Publishers.
Tagg, Philip. Towards a definition of ‘Music’. Liverpool: England: Institute of Popular Music, University of Liverpool, 2002. http://www.tagg.org/teaching/musdef.pdf.
