Calypso served Trinidad as a newspaper, a protest and later a global pop craze
Many Trinidadians once trusted calypso songs more than any newspaper. Singers carried news of scandal and corruption from town to town, and when censors pushed back they turned to double meanings, for instance denouncing Germany's seizure of Poland in lines that plainly also targeted the colonial government in Port of Spain.
The style grew among Afro-Trinidadians in the nineteenth century, with rhythms reaching back to West African kaiso and to the people enslaved on sugar plantations, who used song to talk to one another and to mock their owners. Early calypsos were usually sung in French Creole by a leader first called a griot, then a chantuelle and finally a calypsonian. The word itself is disputed. One theory links kaiso to Efik and Ibibio phrases meaning go on, used to urge a performer forward; another derives it from the French carrouseaux.
Modern calypso blended masquerade songs, the Creole belair and the chants of calinda stick-fighters, and it rose alongside Carnival, which French settlers had brought and whose song contests flourished after slavery ended in 1834. Lovey's String Band made the first recognisable calypso record in New York in 1912. Two years later the stick-fighter known as the Iron Duke recorded the first sung in English. In 1934 a Port of Spain shop owner, Eduardo de Sá Gomes, paid for Roaring Lion and Attila the Hun to record in New York, making them the first calypsonians to do so abroad.
Lord Invader's song Rum and Coca-Cola, a biting look at the effects of American bases on Trinidad, became a 1944 hit for the Andrews Sisters, and he stayed in New York to fight a legal case over it. Harry Belafonte's 1956 album Calypso, featuring a softened Banana Boat Song, became the first album of the genre to top a million sales, and Hollywood rushed out films to cash in the following year.
Women broke into the field in the 1970s. Calypso Rose won the Road March in 1977 and the Calypso King title the next year, after which the prize was renamed Calypso Monarch. By then soca, mixing calypso with East Indian music, soul and funk, was taking over.
Source: Calypso music
