The Caribbean Beat January/February 2008 issue carries, among many other articles, two contrasting features on the Caribbean’s great cultural traditions, reggae and calypso. One feature invites readers to remember a strident act from the recent past, proclaiming it a vintage performance that remains strong and has never changed. The other expresses fears that a great act from the very foundations of the Caribbean musical tradition is facing extinction and might have to change with the times to survive.
Caribbean Beat, published in Port-of-Spain by MEP, is edited by Judy Raymond. But it still maintains its association with two of its most celebrated names, Consulting Editors Jeremy Taylor and Nicholas Laughlin, who previously edited the magazine and are also well known in connection with the Caribbean Review of Books. The Beat maintains its own close contact with Caribbean books in its offer of brief reviews which are now different in style and a little longer than they were when run by Taylor and Laughlin. But that tradition continues with coverage of some significant titles including Four Taxis Facing North, a debut collection of short stories on the Trinidadian middle class by Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw, daughter of the great Derek Walcott, and Badjohns, Bhaaji & Banknote Blue: Essays on the Social History of Language in Trinidad and Tobago, by linguist Lise Winer.
For a region in which nothing was created, the Caribbean has not done so badly at all. Two of its greatest cultural contributions to the world, the reggae and the calypso, are featured in the Beat January/February 2008. Two articles on reggae, one about bastion of culture music Burning Spear and the other about two of the best-known reggae instrumentalists, Sly Dunbar and Robbie Shakespeare, radiate prevailing longevity; while the other, about the tradition of the calypso tent, is draped in doubt about the future.
The feature ‘Is Calypso Dying?’ by Debbie Jacob casts a despairing eye on the present state of the calypso tent in Trinidad and wonders if they are going out of style, out of favour and out of their time. She wonders whether the old-time, old-style art of calypso with commentary on society and politics has lost its popularity, and is now totally supplanted by the more up-beat, faster paced soca and party music. She cites the comments and concerns of a few calypsonians and tent managers, the falling numbers and reduction in audiences, as well as the fact that some tents have closed and others might follow.
The indications are that three things are happening, each leading to the same result. One is that the older forms of the calypso are capitulating to the soca, and the newer forms tend to be more popular and market-driven so that the traditional kaiso is less in demand. Secondly, the large crowds that used to flock the tents to hear those types of commentary and humour no longer get what they have been accustomed to, and have therefore deserted the tents. The third is that today’s audience has little taste for the traditional calypso and goes elsewhere for entertainment.
Are we witnessing the passing of an ancient tradition? The leading authority on the calypso, Gordon Rohlehr, identifies the first calypso tent of the modern era as The Railroad Millionaires opened in 1921 by Chieftain Walter Douglas at 26 Duncan Street in east Port-of-Spain. The styling and set-up of this new tent was said to be a deliberate attempt to create a new brand and image for calypso and the tent. This was because the calypsonian had developed a very bad and degenerate reputation for rum-drinking and lawlessness. In addition, the move was to divorce the tent from the equally discredited stick-fighting Kalinda associations. That was also a sign that the middle class – perhaps, more accurately – the entrepreneurial middle class, had taken a keener interest in the predominantly working-class calypso.
However, the tradition goes much further back to previous centuries. A useful date is 1783, when a new colonial dispensation invited French settlers into Trinidad, and the early forms of the Creole calypso came with them from the French Caribbean islands. The Trinidadian French Creoles dominated when the form developed in the island and calypsos were sung mainly in Patois. Several forces of history, especially the development of the ‘Jamette carnival,’ brought the calypso and calypso tents into disrepute in the late nineteenth century. Associated with it, as well, were the violence of the stick-fighting tradition and the tainted disreputable reputation of the lumpen proletariat of east Port-of-Spain.
In spite of all that, the calypso and the tent, developed as a glorious creative and social tradition that for a long time suffered from the prejudices and suppressive legislation of the ruling classes. This history is documented by Rohlehr, among others, and celebrated in theatre by Rawle Gibbons. In a work known as The Calypso Trilogy, Gibbons dramatises the rise of the tents and the calypsonians of the modern era, including the careers of Spoiler, Lord Kitchener and the emergence of The Mighty Sparrow in the contemporary calypso.
The tents flourished in previous decades, including the Calypso Revue run by Kitchener, one organized by the official calypsonians association, and the Original Young Brigade run by Sparrow, who also carried on with a tent at his Sparrow’s Hideaway in Diego Martin. Those have all either closed or been replaced. Perhaps the heaviest cloud of discouragement accumulated over the viability of the tents when one of the largest and most popular of them, Spektakular, closed in 2003 because of dwindling audiences.
Debbie Jacob quotes a number of practitioners and managers who all point to that factor as the greatest sign of change or challenge to the calypso and the tent. Some say they have passed their time and can no longer be sustained by an aging audience. They say contemporary tastes are different and the tents will have to satisfy the current market or fold up. Other opinions are not prepared to give up, and argue that while prevailing factors such as escalating crime have caused many to stay away from the tents in the capital city, the audiences are just as enthusiastic as they have always been in the out-of-town locations.
There is also a consensus that the calypso and the calypso tent are established and entrenched parts of the Trinidad Carnival and are guaranteed a place. The tradition will live on as long as carnival exists.
On an entirely different note is the feature on reggae, ‘Do You Remember?’ by David Katz who pays tribute to one of the long-standing establishments in roots reggae. It reviews the career of Burning Spear, whose real name is Winston Rodney, born in poverty in St Ann, Jamaica – Bob Marley country. Burning Spear is as strong and viable a voice as ever with his very strident, distinctive rustic sound and his unchanged adherence to ‘culture’ in a changing market for other newer, more upbeat types. The Spear, who is known for Marcus Garvey, Slavery Days and Christopher Columbus, who he calls “a damn blasted liar” now lives mostly in Queens, New York, but maintains not only his original home in St Ann, but his original voice and his main themes of Rastafari, Black liberation and the heritage of slavery.
The other reggae feature celebrates Sly Dunbar and Robbie Shakespeare, who have been playing drum and bass for the greatest of reggae since the 1970s. They have toured and played with Bob Marley and Peter Tosh, and have been associated with some of the leading music recorded in the reggae tradition. Regardless of shifts and changes, they march on.
