Calypso

This article examines music’s role in decolonising processes in Trinidad and Tobago, focusing on postcolonial national identity politics with reference to the country’s two largest ethnic groups: those descended from enslaved Africans and those from indentured labourers from India. First, the article traces the nationalisation of Creole culture – defined in terms of African- European syncretism – from the 1950s onwards, and it describes the state’s use of music competitions and educational programmes to institutionalise Carnival, calypso, and steel pan, all associated largely with African Trinidadian culture. This impacted on Indian Trinidadians by excluding them from inscriptions of national identity. The article concludes with a discussion of Indian Trinidadian cultural resurgence, tassa competitions, and the growth of public pedagogy from the 1970s that established tassa as an icon of Indianness; and all illustrating how music was used in a complex decolonisation process (relating to colonial rule and the Creole mainstream).

A review and comparison of four Calypso Tents during Trinidad & Tobago Carnival 2014: three traditional Calypso tents: Kaiso House, Kaiso Karavan, The Kalypso Revue, and a new venture based on the concept of a calypso tent re-imagined as a Las Vegas-style show, “Live at the Hyatt”. I also looked at the experiences of four calypsonians during the Carnival 2014 period: Winston Henry “The Explainer” of Kaiso House, Kurt Allen of Kaiso Karavan,  David Rudder and Destra Garcia of “Live at the Hyatt”.

Entrenched beneath the cosmic, mystical storyline of the Odyssey is an erotic undertone that Homer utilizes to depict virtuousness (conjugal love and fidelity), promiscuity (lack of restraint), and the power of goddess arousal. Many of the female characters are primarily defined by their sexuality, as well as by their general demeanor with men (Fletcher 77). The behaviors of the women appear to be commensurate with their typology in the story: goddesses (and semidivine); virtuous mortals of high socioeconomic stature; and working class (generally peasants, maids, and slaves).  Exceptions to this observation are clearly identifiable in the subclasses. Among the goddesses are the altruistic and egotistical, the benevolent and malevolent, and the acquiescent and the conquered. A subclass within the exemplary cast of mortal women was not recognized; they appear to remain static in purity and principle. The maids, however, represent both the chaste and the corrupt. There is a cynicism and dubiosity lurking behind the motives and behaviors of the female characters, especially regarding their sexuality (Franco 59); however, the proverbial double standard for men’s sexual behavior is quite prominent. Odysseus does, indeed, have adulterous relations throughout his journey, albeit with goddesses.

Pour "raconter l'Odyssée" et pour en montrer l'audace technique, je prends appui sur un des personnages qui ont, dans la structure du poème, un rôle décisif. C'est celui de Calypso, la nymphe immortelle de l'île du bout des mers, chez qui Ulysse a vécu sept ans dans une prison dorée. Je vais montrer comment les apparitions successives de Calypso dans l'Odyssée permettent d'en comprendre l'astuce, la profondeur, et aussi cette invention majeure dans l'histoire des littératures, la tendresse.

Xenia was a vital thread in the social fabric of both the Homeric world and the eighth century BC. However, due to its very importance and due to the changing environment of the world in which Homer was composing, xenia is flagged as a cause for concern in Homer through the portrayal of certain characters, situations and relationships: examples of xenia appear throughout the Odyssey and are persistently problematic. Through these examples of xenia, Homer inspires a discussion about it, which implies that it was vulnerable to abuse and change, and that the boundaries of such relationships were not concretely defined. Homer demonstrates that xenia was a way of gauging the level of civilisation of a community, which Odysseus must identify as he encounters new and alien groups on his voyage and must either depend on their hospitality or escape from their enmity. Homer also uses certain examples of xenia to define that it was a personal relationship rather than as a system of exchange that could benefit a wider community. He places xenia on a spectrum of exchange, which encompasses concerns about its relation to trade and piracy. Throughout, xenia is flagged as a concept of huge importance, yet also of huge concern, and thus an essential issue for discussion in the epic.

The native music of Trinidad and Tobago was first recorded on disc in 1912, some five years before jazz music was recorded. Over the next century, the fusion of ideas and the invasion of influences have morphed that local music into various genres like soca, but those musicians who steadfastly maintained  that improvised music was the domain of the Americas have created a new sub-genre of calypso jazz that thrives tenuously in the economic space on the island and within the diaspora. This time line of the development and dispersion of the music catalogs its growth, its commercial appeal beyond the border and its true significance within the economic and cultural space of the Caribbean.

El calypso costarricense es una música afrocaribeña que nace enmarcada culturalmente a partir del contingente de inmigrantes jamaicanos llegados a Costa Rica desde 1872, traídos para trabajar en la construcción del ferrocarril al Atlántico. Este componente humano aportó la base para que alrededor de las primeras décadas del siglo XX se forjara en la provincia de Limón una música muy similar a otra que también provenía de Jamaica, mento music, pero que siempre fue conocida por los limonenses como “calypso”, equívoco que nunca fue corregido (ni tuvo por qué haberlo sido).
Comenzaremos este trabajo haciendo una breve contextualización histórica. Luego nos referiremos a los dos principales insumos del calypso costarricense, el mento jamaicano y el calypso trinitario, centrándonos mayormente en el primero. Por último, haremos un pequeño análisis musical de algunos calypsos representativos de Walter Ferguson.

This volume is dedicated to:
Calypsonian “Singing Sandra” – Sandra Des Vignes-Millington (1957 - 28 January 2021), role model and mentor; the only female calypsonian to win the Calypso Monarch title twice.
A protagonist for social reform among the underprivileged and destitute, a heroine for racial unity, latitudinarianism and liberalism
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This volume also celebrates
100 Years of the Founding of the First Calypso Tent in Trinidad and Tobago (1921 - 2021)

This short book on “calypso music and resistance on Aruba” is a compilation of selected conference proceedings and speeches given between the period of 2010 and 2013 by Gregory Richardson. This book aims to present new perspectives in the field of calypso research in a region (Dutch Caribbean) that has not yet sufficiently been explored. Themes such as double entendre (double meaning), multilingualism, mele (gossip),  humor, social/political commentary and self reflection have been elaborated upon.
The Author is also the co-author of the book Sibling Voices of Sunrise City.

This study looks at the effect that the introduction of the Electric Guitar had on the recordings and performance of Trinidad’s Calypso music. The two-part study uses Alan Lomax’s Cantometrics as a foundation to ‘Kaisometrics’, which looks at features of influence from specific popular musical genres rather than vocal features in the Road March and Calypso Monarch Title holders from 1960 – 1980. The study also relies on the expertise and stories of various individuals involved in the Carnival musical landscape.

This cultural study compares John Lennon and Paul McCartney’s approaches to the theme of belonging through representations of home, class, nation and religion. It discusses their songs written as leaders of The Beatles from 1962-9 and also their solo work from 1968 onwards. Expanding theoretical models from Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy (1957) and Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (1983), the study relates differences and similarities in their perspectives as songwriters to their class origins. Hoggart’s arguments concerning home and class are set in dialogue with Anderson’s concerning nation. Musicological terms from Theodor W. Adorno’s ‘On Popular Music’ (1941) are employed to supplement Hoggart’s writings on the genre.
Chapter 1 critiques related studies. Chapter 2 compares the theoretical arguments drawn from Hoggart, Anderson and Adorno. Chapter 3 argues that home, the predominant, evolving motif of belonging throughout the songs, illustrates both lyricists’ emergence from working-class song traditions as critiqued by Hoggart. Gender representations are compared. Chapter 4 examines Lennon and McCartney’s family and class origins. Distinctions in the songwriters’ backgrounds are identified and aligned with different social views in their lyrics. I expand on Hoggart’s terms to distinguish McCartney’s “working-class” focus on the concrete from Lennon’s “uprooted” focus on the conceptual. Chapter 5 compares avant-garde influences in Lennon and McCartney’s songs and considers how these suggested changes in the class belonging of popular music. Chapter 6 compares ideas of community in the two songwriters’ work. Focusing on religion, “race” and protest, the chapter argues against Anderson’s theoretical tenets of how nations are imagined as communities despite inequality. Chapter 6 also utilises my specially-conducted correspondence to argue the important influence of local black Liverpool musicians on The Beatles in 1959-61.
The thesis concludes that McCartney’s focus on the real and concrete and Lennon’s on the radical and conceptual are mutually flattering, and that the evolving theme of belonging is central to the cultural significance of their work.

This paper explores the issues of ethnicity and identity in the post‐colonial Caribbean with special reference to Trinidad and Tobago. As with other multi‐ethnic post‐colonial societies, the collapse of post‐World‐War II promises of unified national projects based on the nation‐state or class politics has seen the re‐emergence of racial/ethnic based trajectories. In the context of the contestations of ethnicity, class, and gender in Trinidad and Tobago, the voice of the “Dougla,” or those projecting “dougla identities” of mixed African and Indian ancestry, has been largely missing. Unlike in the North, conceptions of “mixed” identity have existed in the region for many decades. A concept of multiracial identity, however, is relatively new and underdeveloped. This paper explores tentative attempts through the popular culture to express such multiracial identities, especially through the medium of Calypso and Soca and the contestations that greet such an emergence. The dynamics of the changing social, political, and cultural context are also taken into consideration. It does so through the contrasting 1996 “hits” of two singer/songwriters in the Calypso /Soca genre, Brother Marvin and Chris Garcia.

Key words: Dougla, Ethnicity, Culture, Gender, Trinidad and Tobago

The intermixing of literary, oral and performance cultures has long been the bedrock of Caribbean writing. Through an analysis of contemporary writing by Anthony Joseph, Nalo Hopkinson, Monique Roffey, Marcia Douglas, Robert Antoni, Nicolás Guillén and Tanya Shirley, this essay demonstrates how contemporary Caribbean writing embraces popular culture to challenge Euro- and American-centric ideologies and destabilize the perceived boundaries between oral and scribal cultures. Popular culture in these texts challenges the writer to experiment with form, language and rhythm rooted in call-and-response, folklore traditions, and Caribbean musical forms such as reggae, calypso, dancehall, mento, zouk, bélé and Afro-Cuban drumming. Drawing from conceptualizations of Caribbean culture in the work of critics Gerard Aching, Antonio Benítez-Rojo, Kevin Adonis Browne, Carolyn Cooper and Kwame Dawes, this essay demonstrates how the oral is always whispering below the surface of the written text as Caribbean authors permeate their writings with soundscapes of Caribbean languages and music. Importantly too, drawing from the rich cultural traditions of the region also becomes a means through which the poetic and literary become explicitly political. These writers fulfil Kamau Brathwaite’s celebrated call in ‘Jazz and the West Indian Novel’ for the Caribbean artist to draw from and acclaim their indigenous, local cultural forms and commu- nity; yet they also adapt and adopt popular culture with a critical eye, particularly in relation to the misogyny and sexism often performed within dancehall and carnival cultures.

In one of many versions of the popular early twentieth century calypso, "West Indian Weed Woman," the song's namesake (an unusual street vendor encountered by the singer, Bill Rogers) lists over sixty herbal folk remedies. After carefully transcribing the popular names of the herbs mentioned in the song, the investigators proceeded to locate the botanical names of the species. In the process, they discovered that more than half were endemic to the Caribbean and South America. Further research revealed that all of these endemic herbs have Indigenous medicinal applications, some of which are mentioned in the verses of the Rogers calypso. Thus, the song represents not only an intersection between West Indian folk medicine and popular culture and music, but reveals the extent to which Amerindian pharmacology was retained by an overarching Afro-Caribbean culture during the colonial and early modern period of the region.

Las piezas musicales que componen esta colección se han almacenado en formato Microsoft OneDrive (https://1drv.ms/u/s!AisN19ltgXzegZQ1F1wK0n3UsBqmfA?e=ltWNut) para su localización y ejecución en cualquier dispostivo y plataforma.

El principal objetivo de armar esta colección es ayudar a distinguir el inmenso número de géneros y estilos musicales apiñados en esta pequeña isla y salir al cruce al mito que establece que al menos una parte de esta música se inspira en la presunta religión del Ras-Tafari, esto es, en la liturgia o el ritual del Negus de Etiopía, Haile Selassie. Las música afro de Jamaica tienen un origen muy distinto, ya que no nunca vinieron contingentes esclavos de Etiopía a América.

La comprensiòn plena del papel de Jamaica en el contexto global de la música implica factores muy diferentes a los involucrados en el resto del continente americano. La temprana expulsión de los españoles implica que, por de pronto, no hay un barroco jamaiquino a considerar. La historia temprana de la música jamaiquina posee un espesor y una textura distinta al caso latinoamericano.

The calypso is one of the greatest cultural contributions of the Caribbean. Originating in Trinidad and Tobago, it has grown over the last century to be part of the cultural experience of most of the Anglophone countries, and even some of the Spanish-speaking parts of the Caribbean littoral. This article explores the many ways in which the calypso reveals much about the construction of masculinity through its lyrics. It examines how this aspect of Caribbean popular culture conceives of what constitutes manliness, the burdens this imposes on men, the way men define their sexuality and address issues of desire, and the way the male gaze informs how men view and relate to women. The paper also uses as its point of departure, the calypsos of the 1960s, with particular reference to the songs of The Mighty Sparrow and The Lord Kitchener, two of the greatest exponents of the art form. This essay therefore represents one way of looking at the reciprocal relationship between the artist and the people in the construction of masculinity.

The Hellenistic and Roman literary echoes of the Calypso episode in the ‘Odyssey’ are not particularly numerous, and all of them are deeply influenced by changing cultural demands on the ‘appropriateness’ of one’s emotionality. As we move forward from Homer, unrestrained emotions are increasingly considered typical of women; men are usually expected to act rationally and not under the influence of passions and personal
feelings. This cultural change informs the (sometimes satirical) way Propertius, Ovid and Apuleius, among others, treat the Calypso theme.

A comparison of the structure and operations of two popular Carnival masquerade bands in Trinidad & Tobago: Harts' - who pioneered the much-criticized "bikini-and-beads" masquerade, and YUMA (Young, Upwardly-Mobile Adults) - a newcomer to the Trinidad & Tobago Carnival.

Este trabajo explora las relaciones entre dos prácticas musicales: el calypso limonense y la composición erudita. Utilizando la creación artística como espacio de reflexión, fenómeno objeto de análisis y herramienta de intervención social, se desarrolla una propuesta de recreación del calypso que le permita trascender las funciones de reproducción identitaria que históricamente se han asociado en Costa Rica con la música folclorizada.

This paper presents an overview of the emergence of Masculinity Studies
in the Caribbean region, with special emphasis on the Anglophone Carib
bean. The varying manifestations of the still fledgling men's movement is
examined and the increasing awareness of men's issues as gender issues.
The development of scholarship on men and masculinity in this region is
examined chronologically beginning in the late 1980s. The different start
ing point for this discourse in comparison with similar developments in
North America is noted. While the emergence of this field can be seen as a
new and exciting component of feminist scholarship in the region, the
contribution of some of these studies to the backlash against the women's
movement is also considered. The paper also begins to examine the impact
of this entire discourse on national and regional policy and programming
at government and non-governmental level.

El siguiente artículo tiene como objetivo problematizar los procesos socio-históricos y socio-culturales que marcan la inserción del Calipso Limonense como música periférica en las estructuras ideológicas del estado nación y la cultura hegemónica costarricense. Las dos primeras secciones del artículo elaboran una caracterización general de las dinámicas de acumulación, racismo y marginalidad del espacio social caribeño en donde surge el calipso. La tercera, cuarta y quinta sección tienen como objetivo analizar las dinámicas contradictorias de inclusión, canibalización, lucha identitaria y mercantilización, en tensión con las dinámicas estructurales y la riqueza cultural del Calipso Limonense.
The  following  article  aims  to  problematize  the  socio-cultural  and socio-historical  processes  that  mark  the  insertion  of Calypso  Limonenseas  peripheral culture into ideological structures of the nation state and the Costa Rican hegemonic culture. The first two sections of the article made a general characterization of the dynamics  of  accumulation,  racism  and  marginalization  of  Caribbean  social  space where  calypso  arises. The  third,  fourth  and  fifth  sections  are  used  to  analyze  the contradictory  dynamics  of  inclusion,  cannibalization,  identity  struggle  and commodification,in  tension  with  the  structural  dynamics  and  cultural  richness  of Calipso Limonense

When one thinks of national arrangers and composers, one is often at a loss to name those persons who often never see the spotlight; those persons who are the spark of creativity that gives rise to stardom. The performers steal the limelight, but these unsung heroes who give birth to the heart and soul of the music that inspires and enriches our lives, are often overlooked and forgotten. One such composer whose prolificacy and accomplishment distinguishes him among his peers is Winsford Devine.  He has composed more than 500 calypsos over a career of over 30 years, and is the genius behind of many of the calypsos of the Monarchs.

This paper aims to discuss the significance of selected disciplines of the Notting Hill Carnival held in London annually on August bank holiday weekend for the identity of Caribbean diaspora residing in Britain. Drawing on the turbulent history of the now gentrified area of Notting Hill and the history of carnival in London, I will demonstrate the importance of the event in the struggle for the recognition and appreciation of the creativity of black community in the UK. Through a case study of calypso performance in London, I intend to illustrate the multiplicity of approaches to the role of this particular form of cultural heritage and diversity of standpoints taken by calypso artists. The underlying motif of calypso’s “transplantation ” from Trinidad to Britain will allow me to present calypso as a “living cultural practice ” which has undergone alterations in the British context, introduced in order to render it more meaningful to the diasporic audience. I will also problematise ...

That was how Belafonte liked it. Bottomed out and mad. He had a voice, a dancer, a camera, and his own almost supernatural control of the stage. What he needed, he realized, was a church. A temple. Because he wanted Miss Barbara Britton to understand what this really was. Not a song and dance—not just a song and dance—but—“you see it?” he asks me, and through his eyes, then my own, I do: A judgment.

In post-revolution Grenada, explorations of identity often reveal a generational divide. This generational divide is frequently expressed through music (Sirek 2013, 2018). In this qualitative case study I use an ethnographic methodological approach to examine Grenadian calypso and soca music, analyzing data collected from observations and participant observations, interviews, investigation of media/social media; as well as calypso and soca music and lyrics. Drawing from Tönnies’ (1887/2017) constructs of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, I explore the ways in which calypso and soca musicking  (Small 1998) and music education initiatives construct and articulate the generational divide in Grenada.

Keywords: calypso, soca, Grenada, Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, identity, music education