The eMusic Dozen: Classic Calypso

Calypso Awakening collects the best recordings Emory Cook made in and around Trinidad's carnival tents in the years between 1956 and 1962. "Yankees Gone" captures the very performance that won Mighty Sparrow his first festival crown, in 1956. The rolling call-and-response of "Turn Back, Melody," and the up-tempo "Carnival Proclamation" (in which Lord Melody adopts the persona of an American Indian, "chopping from man to child") are equally infectious. But two songs by the largely unknown, Grenada-born Small Island Pride -- who emerged briefly as one of the form's greatest lyricists, and most intense practitioners -- are the real treasures here: "Carnival Celebration" -- which described the exploits of real-life badjohns -- is as fierce and thought-provoking as anything you'll find on today's Urban Radio stations. And "Taxi Driver" is a three-minute miracle. Overall, this is the single best introduction to classic calypso.

If rap is black America's CNN, calypso was the West Indian's newsreel: A party music with clear political intentions. This socially-conscious collection draws upon the first few generations of calypsonians, with a special emphasis on seminal figures like Atilla The Hun, The Tiger and Lord Executor (who reportedly made his debut in 1897, and remained on the scene for another six decades). Their concerns are local ("Shop Closing Ordinance"), international ("The Gold in Africa,") specific ("The Rats," which describes the practices of local prostitutes) and sweeping ("Money Is King," which takes social inequality for its subject). A great many concern a 1937 strike by workers in Trinidad's oil fields, which created a viable labor movement, and resulted (eventually) in the end of colonial rule. The jazz-inflected arrangements are dated, but still delightful ("Down the Road" is almost an anthem). The lyrics have lost none of their bite.

A solid cross-section of the day's leading calypsonians -- King Solomon, The Mighty Cypher, The King Fighter and the improbably-named Chaing-Kai-Sheik -- joined Lord Melody, Mighty Sparrow and a shifting array of small bands to record this wallflowers' view of the goings-on inside a Port of Spain carnival tent, circa 1957. The proceedings are off-the cuff and informal; King Solomon sings to the accompaniment of a single guitar (check out his curt dismissal of Harry Belafonte, which rounds out the album), and the calypsonians alternate between insulting each other -- or themselves, as Lord Melody does on "Creature from the Black Lagoon" -- and chiming in on one another's choruses. But the album was also a showcase for Emory Cook's engineering skills; it's recorded so well, you can hear the cocktail glasses clinking in the background.

Frederick Wilmoth Hendricks, who appears to have been born in Port of Spain in or around 1895, made his name in New York, recording under various names in the '20s, '30s and '40s, performing at the 1939 World's Fair and writing the song ("He Had It Coming") which Louis Jordan and Ella Fitzgerald covered in 1946 (as "Stone Cold Dead in the Market"), subsequently turning it into a rhythm and blues standard. You won't find "He Had It Coming" on this otherwise excellent compilation, which spans the first twelve years of Hendricks' career, starting in 1928. But you will find Houdini imitating a Baptist preacher ("Teacher Nose Gay the Shouter"), working off the effects of drinking binge ("Arima Tonight, Sangre Grande Tomorrow Night") and singing the praises of dark-skinned women ("Black But Sweet"). Another Trinidadian transplant, Gerald Clark, leads the fine West Indian jazz band that backs him on most of these tracks.

Like noted calypsonian Mighty Panther, Fitzroy Alexander (aka Lord Melody) sang in the Young Brigade Tent, and appeared before Princess Margaret in 1956. Melody also shared Panther's lightness of touch and irrepressible sense of humor. He's best remembered as the composer of "Booboo Man" (later covered by both Harry Belafonte and Ella Fitzgerald) and for a longstanding rivalry with the Mighty Sparrow, whom Melody antagonized, and often bested, in calypsos like "Cowboy Sparrow" and "Sparrow's Sister" (you can hear the two calypsonians going head-to-head on Calypso Awakening's "Picong Duel"). Subtlety was not a strong suit: Melody could be vainglorious in one verse, and self-deprecating in the next (see, for instance, the illustration for this album cover). But he was an uncommonly supple, acrobatic vocalist, who treated the rhythms accompanying bands laid down for him like rubber bands. On "The Jumble" he makes a crying jag sound ebullient.

Eloise Lewis was born in Florida and raised in the Bahamas, and somewhere along the way she must have lost her mind. Or so you'd think, listening to Lewis growl, screech and vamp her way through these extremely odd recordings. Technically, the Eloise Trio played "Goombay" -- a Bahamian idiom often indistinguishable from calypso. But Lewis, who also strummed a mean electric guitar, drew on a wide variety of influences: "Blackbeard's Cha Cha" owes something to Cuba's "Guantanamera," and "Digby" is a distant cousin of Harry Belafonte's "Day-O." These intensely rhythmic tracks aren't quite novelty recordings, but they do work especially well as children's songs: At their worst ("Calypso Island"), they're bland and inoffensive; at their best ("Chi Chi Merengue") they're utterly unhinged.

The irrepressible Small Island Pride performed the first seven calypsos on this 1959 release ("Apple Vendor," which takes the sexual metaphors that gave "Taxi Driver" its bite and extends them even further, is especially strong, and the instrumental "Me Ting is Mine" is slinky and danceable), and the calypsonians who followed came close to matching him. "Neighbor Jacquelline" is a furious exchange between Mighty Wrangler, his band, and the backing chorus -- "swizzle it, swizzle it, sweet like syrup," Wrangler sings, and the tent is set a-swirling. (Needless to say, this calypso too is a sexual metaphor, stretched almost to the breaking point.) Lord Commander's "You Can't Finish Pleasing People" takes up where Fats Waller's "Ain't Nobody's Business (If I Do)" left off, and the wryly argued legal casuistry of "No Crime, No Law" inspired Derek Walcott to compare Commander to "Germany's best poet of this generation, Bertolt Brecht."

Lord Invader (aka Rupert Westmore Grant, born in Port of Spain in 1914), who spent long stretches abroad and tailored many of his best songs to the concerns of West Indian expats, also had immense potential as a crossover artist. His "Rum and Coca Cola" was covered by the Andrews Sisters in 1945 and sold four million records. (Invader sued, and won $150,000 in royalties, but lost his rights to the composition.) In 1946, he began recording for Moe Asch's Folkways Records, which presented him, misleadingly, as a rough-hewn, avuncular folk artist. In fact, like his labelmate Lead Belly, Invader was a consummate professional, and -- for his day -- a surprisingly candid lyricist. "Some passing you empty/ And yet they won't stop" he sang (on "New York, Subway"). "I had money but I had to roam/ I couldn't get a cab to drop me back home." Like the best calypsonians, Invader (who died in 1961) had a way of smiling through clenched teeth.

Mighty Sparrow, who remains active to this day -- one of his most recent compositions is called "Barack the Magnificent" -- was born in Grenada in 1935 (Sparrow's given name, Slinger Francisco, is even better than his stage name). He won the first of many Calypso Monarch titles at the age of twenty-one, and followed up it up with these recordings for the Cook label. Happily, the building blocks of Sparrow's wildly imaginative style -- dense wordplay, razor-sharp rhymes and a cinematographer's eye for telling details -- are already in place. The tempos are fast; the flow is crystalline: On "Gun Slingers," he styles himself an arms dealer and spits: "Nearly every young man has got a stinger/ With a razor and a steel knuckle on the finger/ Don't mind the pressed suit and bow-tie/ All of them looking for gun to buy."

Sparrow's great friend, Lord Kitchener was calypso's Cassius Clay: A singer whose sense of humor sometimes threatened to overshadow his innate abilities and seriousness of purpose. And like Ali, Kitchener might have been the single greatest practitioner of his art. Born Aldwyn Roberts, in 1922, Kitchener stuttered in conversation but soared in song: His phrasing was subtle, delicate, unhurried. His lyrics were earthy -- concrete -- but never crude. And, while he wasn't the flashiest calypsonian, he was versatile, resourceful and remarkably consistent, winning ten Road March titles over the years (this, despite spending much of his career in England), and performing well into the 1990s. Above all, he exuded the good humor, dignity and grace which sets these early recordings apart from the pack.

The spiritual music of Trinidad and Tobago influenced calypso in much the same way that America's slave songs and spirituals informed jazz and the blues: they preserved the West African elements which gave those forms their thrust and coloring. This 1961 album collects field recordings of so-called "Shango Cults" (who spread a patina of Catholic ritual over West African beliefs) and Spiritual Baptists (or "Shouters"), who traced their origins back to liberated slaves who'd fought on the British side during the American Revolution. The Shango ceremonies are intensely polyrhythmic, with call-and-response qualities rooted in Yoruba chants. The Shouter services are more demure and, to fans of America's own old-timey music, they'll sound more familiar. (Check out track ten, which begins with a recitation of the 23rd Psalm.) If dance tunes are trance tunes -- and Calypsos are both -- then these are the music's starting points.