New York - By Dr. Hollis Liverpol o(Chalkdust) Young Destroyer destroys Trinidad! So ran the headlines of an Antiguan newspaper last week while the newspapers of Trinidad wrote the same news in tiny corners of their newsprint, cowering as it were, from defeat and shame, following the Carifesta Calypso finals held at the Jean Pierre Complex on September 29th. It was a night when the Mighty Duke yelled out: “Shame! Shame! Shame!
Antigua beating we in Trinidad!” It was truly a night of shame for the Trinidadians and the Trinidad Calypso in particular, for never in the history of the art form had an “outsider” beaten Trinidad in calypso in the land of calypso, and to make matters worse, the “outsider, “ with his mother’s milk still flowing in his arteries, demolished eight Trinidad senior singers in the month that TUCO calls “calypso month.” I happened to be present and, with calypsonians Duke, Funny, Rio and Hamidullah as well as calypso lovers like Dr. Stanley Plowden, Mackandaal Daaga and Michael Swann, couldn’t help agreeing with the judges’ decision as, to use the words of the Mighty Duke, “the Trinidadians offered little by way of good calypso composition.” Duke went on to say, that if more points were given for the Carifesta tune than for the “Tune of Choice,” the Trinis would have scraped the bottom of the barrel since the guys from St. Maarten and Grenada were far better than us in that genre.” I happened to also see the Mighty Protector silent and in awe, judging from the painful expression on his face, for as president of TUCO, he too was ashamed and whispered loudly to a friend about the depths to which our country had sunk. Should I congratulate Young Destroyer for his masterful victory over Trinidad?
Why was the defeat such a historical one? It is historical because back in the 1980s when Barbados was claiming that their calypso didn’t come from Trinidad, the Roaring Lion in anger informed them that when he toured Barbados in the 1930s, it was the first time that Barbadians had ever heard the calypso. Lion was adamant; “It is we who gave Bajans Kaiso,” he reiterated. When too during the Whitsuntide weekend of 1937, Lion, Growler and others went to Grenada for the first time to sing, the Grenadians objected so vehemently to the singing of “Netty Netty” that a subsequent Trinidadian excursion to that island was cancelled by the Grenadian authorities. When in Antigua in the 1960s, Young killer was asked to participate in a calypso contest against the likes of King Short Shirt and Obstinate, he bluntly refused claiming that Short Shirt and others in Antigua were not up to the standard of a third class calypsonian in Trinidad. In a similar vein, it was the Trinidadians Joey Lewis, Ed Watson and master-musician Art DeCoteau—who this government has refused to recognize—who used their musicianship to make decent calypsonians of Swallow in Antigua, Arrow in Montserrat and Becket in St. Vincent. It was Art DeCoteau who gave them performance-pointers changing at times their melodies and their musical introductions and band choruses to give their calypsos “respectability.”
In like manner, Trinidad singers like Power, Sparrow, Melody, Christo, Duke and Zebra so dominated the calypso scene in the British and American Virgin Islands that it wasn’t until the 1980s that a local calypso made the Road March circle in those islands. In the British Virgin Islands in particular, it was Trinidadian musician Roderick Borde who introduced the writing of music to the lads up there and trained them by means of seminars in the art of calypso performance. So adept were Trinidadians at the art of composing, that to most Northerners of the Caribbean, every Trinidadian was a calypsonian and Trinidad, according to Lord Dictator in 1955, was synonymous with good calypso. Lion even sang in the 1940s: “Jump high! Jump low! Trinidad is the land of Calypso.”
How then a non-Trinidadian could today defeat a Trini at his own game?
Not even in the USA, Miami and London where singers from all the West Indian Islands meet, do Caribbean singers match the Trinidadian migrants in composition and performance. Calypso lovers all over the world know that Trinis like Lord Cloak, Alberto, Crusoe Kid and Tiger can’t be beaten in London; none can dethrone Count Robin in New York. Ellsworth James and Jason in Canada have defied all comers and Exposer in Los Angeles and San Francisco remains the king. Leon Coldero and Rootsman are the bosses in Miami and Lord Laro reigns supreme in Jamaica.
I recall the Lord Kitchener refusing to participate in a show in St. Lucia. When I asked him for his reason, he calmly told me in his stuttering style: “Man you yuhself Chalkie, you… you expect me to go on stage in St. Lucia with Lord Jook …Jooking Board?” Of course, in calypso circles worldwide, Jooking Board is a title for a quack. How then in 2006, Lord Jooking Board could destroy the Calypso King of Trinidad? Surely it is something for all calypso lovers to ponder and TUCO and the Ministry of Culture to discuss at length.
To rub salt in the wound, calypso lovers would of course remember how Trinidad singers used to deride the compositions of the islanders. In one such calypso of the 1960s, Lord Blakie in a calypso composed by calypsonian Spitfire spoke of the calypso competition in St. Vincent and the fact that the winner received as his prize “a basin of Shataigne and breadfruit” for his composition “Marning cack a crow Kokeeoko Kokeeoko,” Blakie laughing in that trademark-distinctive style, at the Creole tongue of the Vincentian. Similarly, Spoiler in the 1950s laughed at “Barbadian Carnival” with their “Emerlin pemmerlin yuh body trembelin.” Sir Galba did the same in 1953; Tiny Terror in 1956 and Conqueror in the early 1970s laughed at the Grenadian twang in a calypso entitled “Ah waant two sheet.” Space hinders me from providing readers with the number of Trinidadian calypsonians such as Mudada, Lord Invader, Unknown, Radio, Wonder and Viking who have all laughed at and denigrated in song the quasi-art forms of our northern brothers and sisters. How then the standard of the art form has dropped so low in Trinidad and risen so high in the other islands that they are laughing at us now?
I took pains to inform Makaandal Daaga on the “Night of Shame” that the majority of Trinidad calypsonians depend solely on a few composers who themselves compose for a number of artists in other islands, instead of being prepared to come to a training session and learn the art so as to improve themselves. It has been over five years now that Duke and I have offered our services to TUCO, the NCC and the Ministry of Culture, imploring them to allow us to conduct calypso classes, but to no avail, the Trinidad singers believing that because they have won a competition or have reached the finals of the calypso contest, they have no need for training. Worse yet, as the Carifesta contest has shown, the so-called non-calypsonian composers in Trinidad who supply the singers with calypsos are adept at cursing PNM and UNC; they are outstanding at heralding the body parts of women or of extolling the oppressions that they suffer, but when they are given a theme like Carifesta or any such abstract, vague topics, history shows that they are not up to standard, as their school boy compositions have testified. On the other hand, Duke and I this year conducted calypso classes at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia to a sell-out audience, while I was the facilitator for classes in St. Kitts, Anguilla, Dominica, St. Thomas and Antigua in 2005-2006. No need for me to state that calypsonian Destroyer and his son Young Destroyer were participants of my training programme in Antigua. I therefore wish to heartily congratulate Young Destroyer on his great achievement and for the standard he has demonstrated. He has certainly shown that, in terms of the art form, his island has come of age.
Makaandal Daaga on that “Night of Shame” too, inquired why Duke, Bomber, Stalin and I, as calypso composers, were not on stage defending Trinidad, even as guest artistes. It was difficult for me to explain that not only was I not invited to any Carifesta event including the traditional calypso in the rumshop, but I could not blame the Ministry when my own TUCO had not seen it fit to even invite us to participate in the competition.
But invitation aside, Trinidad via TUCO, needs to pull itself up by its bootstraps so as to redeem our good name in an art where we, like the West Indian Cricket team, once dominated. And surely, that “Night of Shame” did not come on us suddenly! Calypsonian Power in the 1970s reminded us that we were neglecting our culture of steelband and calypso for other areas like sugar when “Cuba have more sugar than Trinidad.” There was my own “Kaiso in Hospital” in 1993 and the Blackman Stalin who before the contest last month prophesied to Kenny de Silva that “Antigua will win,” had since in the 1970s prophesied the debacle of the calypso in Trinidad when he sang: “One of these days we go wake up and hear what we go find/ Jamaica is the land of the Kaiso/ Antigua is the land of the steelband/ Grenada is the land of the Limbo/ And there’ll be nothing for Trinidadians/ Then we go hold we head and baul out: Lord, if ah did know/ If ah did know, Ah woulda hold on to mi steelband and calypso.”
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