By Donna Benny Professor Gordon Rohlehr
Calypso King of the World, The Mighty Sparrow (Slinger Francisco), will celebrate his 90th birthday on July 9. In celebration of this milestone, the Express is paying tribute to this calypso legend with a series that starts today and continues until next Wednesday, his birthday. Excerpts and photographs for the series are reproduced from Sparrow Take Over: Essays on the Bard’s Art, edited by Donna Benny, with her permission.
Trinidad’s calypsonians are frequently called its folk-poets, though those who describe them thus seldom explain what they mean by the term.
One of the major difficulties in discussing the work of Sparrow or of any other calypsonian as poetry is that the calypsonian combines the arts of musician, singer, raconteur, dramatist, showman and dancer.
It is always a futile exercise to discuss the language of the calypso as something divorced from the music, rhythm, and the audience for which the calypso is intended; for calypso is part of an oral tradition, and its full meaning only comes across in the act of performance.
Sparrow has added a sense of true professionalism to the world of the calypso. He has blended the art of raconteur with that of the showman, and in his performance, as in his lyrics, he places a new emphasis on the body. Whereas Spoiler (Theophilus Phillip) and calypsonians of his era placed more emphasis on facial expression and comic gestures, Sparrow emphasises movement, the synchronisation of words, rhythm and dance.
In Spoiler, as in Cypher (Dillary Scott), metre exists as a frail skeleton over which he must establish such strong rhythmic patterns as the sense of what he is saying demands.
Sparrow seems to be continually at war against the confining strictures of the basic beat. It is this which has made his contributions to the rhythm of calypso no less than revolutionary. One thinks of calypsoes like “Sir Garfield Sobers”, “Shanty Town People”, “Carnival in ‘68”, “The Governor’s Ball”, or earlier efforts such as “Robbery with V”, Wahbeen and Grog”, “Ten to One”, “Renegades” and a host of others.
It is too little recognised how Sparrow in life, as well as in art, blends the traditional with the new, straddles two generations as well as two strata in society, and strives to preserve some sense of continuity in an age when the senior and junior generations can scarcely recognise each other as belonging to the same society.
The continuity with the past which Sparrow has preserved has had its negative as well as its positive side. For example, Sparrow carried over from the 1940s into the 1950s the Saga Boy attitudes of violence, easy living off immoral earnings, defiance towards the world in general and especially towards rival Saga Boys; masculinity, sexual superiority, dream-fantasy, flamboyance in dress and manner, elaborate masking and self-evasion, and even a certain sadism. His calypsoes, early and late, have been full of these themes. Real change in his work has been in manner rather than in matter.
Indeed, “Jean and Dinah”, the calypso which first won Sparrow the crown, was really a fresh treatment of a worn-out theme. Most of the Yankees had left Trinidad ten years before, and Kitchener (Aldwyn Roberts), in “Ding Dong Dell”, Growler (Errol Duke)in “Female Taxi-Driver”, and even Spoiler in “Marabella Pork-Vendor” (1947) had already commented on the dire effects of their departure on the local skin-trade. The Saga Boys, whose mouthpiece the calypsonians usually were, had been wounded to the quick by the presence of the richer and more socially acceptable American soldiers.
Kitchener’s “My Wife Left Me for a Yankee” is a confession of the impotence and futility which the Saga Boys had been made to endure during the occupation. In the generation before the Yankees, the Saga Boys used to boast that they could hire out the bodies of their womenfolk and still preserve their hearts. The Yankee presence revealed the economic basis of the Saga Boy-Jamette relationship, the essential sterility of the Saga Boy pose, and the latent inferiority complex of the entire class of jobless, desperate young men, who masked their psychic castration by a cynical pose and a celebration of irresponsibility.
Calypsoes like “Ding Dong Dell” and several others in that genre were really bitter songs of revenge, mocking the plight of the broken good-time girls. Sparrow’s “Jean and Dinah” was of this school; as indeed, were a number of his early efforts, all of which laughed at the hardship facing the destitute prostitute.
Why were they so successful? Part of the explanation must have been that the pride of the West Indian male had been so severely hurt that he was still preoccupied with the idea of making his woman suffer. This, however, was not the whole story.
In those days before the Chaguaramas issue and the government-sponsored anti-Yankee feeling of the late 50s, what would have attracted the crowd to “Jean and Dinah” was the freshness and aggressiveness of rhythm, the new bounce, the sureness of tone of voice, the vitality and biting cynicism with which Sparrow was able to invest a worn-out theme…
It’s the glamour boys again
We are going to rule Port of Spain
No more Yankees to spoil the fete
Dorothy have to take what she get
All of them who used to make style
Taking their two shillings with a smile
No more hotel and Simmonds bed
By the sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat bread.
One notices that as yet Sparrow’s lyrical line is short, punchy, uncluttered by syllables, and contains the type of clarity and force at which Kitchener and Melody (Fitzroy Alexander) were especially expert. It is the last line that indicates a little of the difference between his style even then, and that of the generation before.
Much less rhetorical than Lion was, and is, much less given to the use of long words which Atilla transmitted into the 1940s from the improvised “picong” calypsoes of the late 1920s and 30s, and with a better sense of timing than both of these ‘Golden Age’ figures, Sparrow was able to inject a new economy and terseness into his lyrics. In typical folk style, he ends the narrative with an aphorism that summarises the entire issue – “By the sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat bread.” It is Jehovah handing down the law again to an erring humanity whose independence he can never tolerate. It is the authoritarian West Indian male seeking revenge on his semi-emancipated woman. It is also Sparrow, the new symbol of the transcendent individualism, will-to-power and will-to-self which were to imbue the political and social striving of pre-independence Trinidad.
But perhaps the most important feature of that last line is the “artistic” one. The aphorism from Genesis is wrenched out of its serious religious context, and made to serve the purpose of irony which celebrates amorality rather than providing moral instruction. The tendency to place irony above simple moralising has been one of the major features of Sparrow’s poetic art. Its early and consistent appearance in his work has separated him in consciousness from most other calypsonians of the 1955-1966 decade, which he has undisputedly ruled with rigour, at times with violent self-assertion, and with an inability to endure defeat. The decade before Sparrow had produced the legendary Spoiler, a genius of the absurd with the wryest irony and the most fascinating wit possible. His peculiar contribution to the calypso form had been to explore the hilarious borderlands between apparent sense and apparent nonsense, and also to express the dry laughter of a bizarre age, on the edge of hope, but too familiar with failure and stagnation, and too directionless to make much effort for change.
Sparrow belongs to a different age, and although he has preserved many of the attitudes of the earlier generation, is as much the product of the traumatic beginning of a new era. His boyhood was spent at a time when the possibility of an emerging local leadership seemed about to be realised. In 1956 he was twenty-one, his coming-of-age coinciding with the birth of the PNM, the acquisition of what was termed ‘full internal self-government’, and the slender possibility of nationhood. The nationalist surge of the late fifties, enhanced by the Chaguaramas issue, imbued the entire society with a sense of its hitherto unrealised potential, and allowed a mind like Sparrow’s breathing-space and
purpose for the kind of poise and balance necessary for a social comedy, uninhibited by either rancour or narrow moralising.
The Emergence
Gordon Rohlehr
There was nothing extraordinary about the Mighty Sparrow’s first appearance as a calypsonian at the Old Brigade Tent, South Quay, Port of Spain in 1954. He had had, it is true, little exposure to the calypso world, most of his boyhood singing experience having been confined to singing in the choir of St Patrick’s RC Church and end-of-term school concerts at
Newtown Boys’ RC School.
But at that time, this was true of many calypsonians. Melody, as we have seen, had sung very few calypsoes before he made his debut between 1945 and 1946.
Sparrow, however, knew several calypsoes by heart, especially those of Invader (Rupert Westmore Grant), Kitchener and Melody, and began his career with the rhythms and vivacity of the Young Brigade in his bones. He had paid his dues by rigorously studying the styles and ideas of some of his predecessors, and would continue learning even as he created his own unique style.
In 1954, when he was called Little Sparrow, he sang “The Parrot and the Monkey”, a composition whose name suggests that it belongs to those comic fables that had grown popular since the emergence of Growler (“The Farmer and the Breadfruit
Tree”), Kitchener (“Mango Tree”), Killer [Cephas Alexander] (“Green Fowl”), Melody (“I Had a Little Monkey”) (Data on Sparrow’s first two years as a calypsonian have been derived from Dexter Lyndersay, liner notes to Sparrow’s Greatest Hits RCA Victor 33 rpm LP record, LPB 1067, 1960) and Spoiler.
The next year he had four compositions: “Race Track”, “The High Cost of Living”, “The Missing Baby” and “An Ode to Princess Margaret” (Sunday Guardian, March 1, 1953). Sparrow was quite traditional in his composition of an ode to a visiting member of the Royal Family, though coming so close to the era of self-government, he said more about the virtues of Trinidad – love, sincerity, joy, Carnival etc. – than about the royal visitor, or the virtues of Empire and Commonwealth.
“The High Cost of Living” was a complaint in the tradition of at least a dozen such calypsoes since the 30s. Small Island Pride (Theophilus Woods) sang on the theme in 1952, and Eisenhower (Percival Oblington) sang a calypso with the same title at the Old Brigade Tent in 1953. Sparrow made his debut at that same tent in 1954, and may in fact have sung “The High Cost of Living” in 1954 or composed it that year and held it back until 1955. Lyrics of this calypso appear in a 1954 songbook.
Sparrow toured Guyana in 1955 in the company of Small Island Pride. This proved to be a most rigorous learning experience in which he worked hard traversing the remote regions of Guyana’s coastal towns. It helped
him improve his performance beyond recognition, and prepared him for the 1956 season, when he won the Calyspo King title for the first of seven times until his retirement from that competition in 1974, and the Road March competition for the first of eight times in a career that is now 35 years long.
Melody, who was lead singer and, with Sylvester Taylor, co-manager of the Young Brigade in 1956, insisted that Sparrow, who had migrated from the Old Brigade where he started, be paid as a top singer.
That year, Sparrow sang his now famous Jean and Dinah, and soon included in his repertoire “Jack Palance”, “Queen’s Canary”, “Sparrow’s Dream” and “Thirteen-Year-Old Mabel”.
“Jean and Dinah” was originally composed as an advertising jingle for Salvatori and Scott which, not having requested it, sent the persistent Sparrow away with only $2.00 for his pains. Sparrow kept the melody, which he is rumoured to have borrowed from Blakie (Carlton Joseph), and changed the lyrics to what they became: an expression of elation at the final withdrawal of the Yankees. Most of the Americans had left over a decade earlier, when Sparrow would have been around ten years old.
Sparrow Take Over: Essays on the Bard’s Art, can be found at Paper Based, Alcazar Street, St Clair; Metropolitan Bookshop, Ariapita Avenue, Port of Spain; Blue Edition, St Vincent Street, Tunapuna; Scribbles and Quills, Gaston Street, Chaguanas; School and Office Supplies, Western Main Road