By the very definition of what they are, epiphanies come at us uninvited. In my case, becoming involved in a musical career as a young man, one such awakening came in Toronto when I migrated there in the late 1950s and suddenly became aware, through some Trinidadian friends, of the astonishing legacy of calypso music that country had produced. I say “awakening” because while I knew about calypso as the popular music of the day then in the region, I was quite ignorant of the staggering repertoire of music that had been built over the years in Trinidad, going back to the early adventurers in the field from Atilla the Hun, through Spoiler, Lord Superior, Radio, Growler, etc. It is somewhat of a phenomenon that it was an evolution almost totally driven by Trinidad, and, in particular (I have mentioned this previously) that the people writing and performing the music at carnival and throughout the year were taking the singular approach of writing, literally, about every subject under the sun. In mankind’s popular music, as a rule, the subject matter is usually romance or emotion; not so in Trinidad. I don’t know enough Trinidad history to attempt to explain this oddity, but oddity it is, and the other oddity is that it was a Trini evolution. Yes, others copied it once it had begun to roll – Jamaica, Barbados, and to some extent Guyana, mainly with Bill Rogers – but the thing began and grew in Trinidad and what is most striking is the span of it. Trinidad writers were going at every subject under the sun – a ship sinking in the Gulf of Paria, the development of their prisoners being put away on the separate island of Carrera, the presence of a US naval base in the main island of Trinidad, and even the seemingly bland subject of a pay raise for policemen as Sparrow would later produce. As someone engrossed with subjects for my own song-writing efforts, this was akin to a massive door opening in front of me, leading to a wide open horizon. Much of the time, of course, I was in the dark concerning the subjects of the Trini songs and had to ask about this, but in the process I saw doors opening for me that, frankly, I had never considered before. To put it simply, everything became song material, as I would later demonstrate in my own work when I wrote about the advantages in the life of household dogs in the Caribbean (I Want to be a Puppy), or Guyana’s diffidence for memorials (Where Are Your Heroes) or seeing animals as being more astute than mankind (Civilisation). As I look around at the music scene in other countries, this wide canvas we have in Caribbean popular music is, the rhythmic ingredient aside, the most enthralling aspect of our music.
