Toward a Definition of Calypso (Part I)

Abstract

Problem: popularity of such songs as Day-O and r'amaica Farewell sung in pseudo-West Indian dialect and called requires a fresh investigation into this traditional Trinidadian musical form. recent craze which accounted for one fourth of popular record sales (Time, 1957:55) and wherein one Belafonte album sold nearly a million copies (Cappon, 1957) is not the first to occur in the United States. first calypso recordings were put out by Victor in 1914 (Espinet and Pitts, 1944:40), by Columbia in 1925 and Okeh in 1927-1928 (Van Dam, 1954:4), and several New York nightclubs featured calypsonians in the late '30's. In 1942 the Andrews Sisters made the world resound with five million copies of Rum and Coca-Cola, describing the effect of the setting up of American military bases in Trinidad, where both Mother and Daughter working for the Yonkee Dollah. In answering Belafonte's charge that this is not authentic calypso, the sisters explained that the song as sung by the Duke of Iron (Cecil Anderson, a Trinidadian who has lived in the U. S. since the '30's) was originally about the death of a drunken Jamaican doctor, and that they changed the words, but used the original melody (Mosby, 1957). Calypso has been subjected to twisting of facts, unqualified generalization, and bald prevarication at least since 1859, when a Trinidadian calypsonian publicly lampooned a visiting American ornithologist for trying to show that calypsos were localized versions of British ballads (Sampson, 1956:257). ridiculousness of much calypso scholarship was recently parodied by Sholem Stein and Henry Jacobs in their recording, The Origin of Calypso and Its Relationship to the Hebraic Mishnah (Fantasy EP 4051). In the case of Rum and Coca-Cola, it is known to have been composed by the Trinidadian Lord Invader (Rupert Grant), who won a lawsuit to this effect (Carr, 1954:163; Brown, 1947:253).