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Institute for Studies In American Music |
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Inside
This Issue: The Composer, the Work, and Its Audience by Adrienne Fried Block Jewish American Music:
Review by Evan Rapport More News from Nowhere: Review by David G. Pier Reviving the Folk: Review by Ray Allen |
Calypso
as a World Music
Harry
Belafonte, Calypso RCA Victor, 1956
Courtesy of Ray Funk
A few months ago I found myself in the
small village of Cahuita, located in the province of Limón on the Atlantic
coast of the Central American country of Costa Rica. Today the province is
inhabited by thousands of descendants of West Indians whose
foreparents_mostly Jamaicans, but also substantial numbers of immigrants from
Barbados, St. Kitts, Trinidad, and other islands—were drawn to Costa
Rica during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by the expanding
banana empire that was to become the United Fruit Company. It's around ten at night, and the local
watering hole we're visiting is just starting to come alive to the sounds of
the house band. A motley group of tourists—Germans, Swiss, Dutch,
Italians, British, North Americans, and urban Costa Ricans—shares the
space with a good number of locals, as well as a few Miskitu Indians from
Nicaragua. All of a sudden, the band announces a guest vocalist for the next
number. As it turns out, the guest singer is a white North American
expatriate who has been living in the area for a while. While checking out
the local scene, he's had a chance to befriend some of the band members. As
he swaggers up to the microphone the band launches into an impromptu version
of "Day-O." Virtually everyone in the international
audience that night was familiar with the song; in that sense, at least, it
could be considered a piece of world music. Indeed, the version I heard is
clearly based on the one recorded by Harry Belafonte in 1956 and released on
his album Calypso, which probably did more than anything before or
since to make "calypso" a household word in the United States and
across the globe. Ironically "Day-O" was not a calypso, nor was the
1956 hit sung by a Trinidadian calypsonian. Belafonte, a New York-born West
Indian of Jamaican parentage, was, by the mid-1950s, a burgeoning actor and
folk singer who was uncomfortable being marketed as a calypsonian. Likewise,
"Day-O" did not emerge from the Carnival tents of Trinidad, but
rather from the docks of Jamaica's ports where banana loaders used the work
song to pace themselves as they performed their arduous labor. This obscure
folk song, originally restricted to a particular banana-growing subregion of
Jamaica, somehow made its way to New York City where, thanks to the American
recording industry and the power of mass media, it quickly became a kind of
world music. And today, some fifty years later, performed in a bar in Costa
Rica, it continues to exemplify this phenomenon, pointing to some of the
questions and contradictions that typically arise when musical genres and
styles originally rooted in one location end up in other places. Consider more closely the scene I witnessed
that night in Cahuita. In front of an audience made up largely of European
and Yankee tourists, a transplanted white American performs a Jamaican song
that has come to him not from actual contact with West Indians, but rather
via commercial recordings and the magic of For many contemporary culture critics, the
term "world music" has come to represent a kind of incorporation of
exotic sounds into a mass-mediated Euro-American-dominated musical economy
through the creation of new markets. We all know of the sometimes unhappy
results of this process. Divorced from its original social matrix,
overdetermined by commercial considerations, and deprived of deeper meanings,
music poached from "Others" can easily become a shallow and empty
facsimile—a very poor substitute for the real thing. But in the past,
as with today's so-called "world music," the outcome of this
process was far from predictable, and the expansion of musical markets could
lead to surprising results in other parts of the world. Turning back to the case
of calypso, even as singers like Belafonte, Nat King Cole, and the Tarriers
were winning new North American audiences with their pop interpretations of
the genre in the 1950s, the original Trinidadian style was simultaneously
being absorbed and creatively refashioned in several other parts of the
world, in ways that have yet to receive extensive study. Consider, for example, the proliferation of
calypso-influenced styles from Ghana, Nigeria, and other West African
countries during the twentieth century. West Indian sailors and soldiers had
introduced calypso and other Caribbean styles to the West African coast as
far back as the nineteenth century, leading to a distinctive new hybrid
called highlife. But even as highlife music flourished in the 1950s, African
versions of calypso held their own. These were no mere imitations. There was
no way of mistaking them for the Caribbean original, for their rhythms,
melodies, and harmonies were clearly influenced by highlife and other African
genres, and their lyrics often dealt with local themes, sometimes in African
languages. Like West Indian calypsos, West African examples also sometimes
registered political protest. For instance, when the assassination of
Congolese leader and Pan-Africanist Patrice Lumumba sent shock waves across
Africa and the diaspora in 1961, E. C. Arinze from Nigeria recorded
"Lumumba Calypso": Man, what have you to say, About the death of Lumumba? Man, what have you to say, About the death of Lumumba? Well, we don't like it, That is what the people say. We don't want it, That is what the public say. At least something must be done, The same could happen to anyone. The case of calypso in West Africa also
reminds us that the migration of sounds is often tied to the migration of people.
It is important to remember that the transnational movement of calypso wasn't
limited to records; the Caribbean people who originally created and lived the
music were themselves transnationals. This brings us to another important hub
in the story of calypso's spread across the planet: the U.K. The major wave
of migration that brought an unprecedented number of West Indians to British
cities such as London, Birmingham, Manchester, and Bristol, beginning in the
late 1940s, was backed at first by a calypso soundtrack. Lord Kitchener
himself was on the SS Empire Windrush with the first group of 500 immigrants,
as was another important calypsonian, Lord Beginner. In London, over the next
decade, they and other newcomers recorded some of the most interesting
calypso of the time. Along with the usual mix of social commentary, their
songs charted the gradual shift from optimism to disillusionment as West
Indians adjusted to a new, sometimes harsh setting. Calypsonians in the U.K.
also mingled with musicians from Africa and other parts of the Caribbean, and
the The globalization of calypso and its
emergence by the mid-twentieth century as one of the original world musics
present scholars with a marvelous opportunity to reconsider the relationship
of music, migration, and identity. World musics, whatever else they might be,
are in part the products of markets and market forces. But like other musics,
they are systems of meaning, and carriers and shapers of social and cultural
identities. In our present world, there is a never-ending tension between, on
one hand, the priorities of marketers and consumers, and on the other hand,
the understandings and claims of those for whom what is being marketed
represents a way of life and an embodiment of identity. The calypso of
Trinidad is one of the earliest examples of a local people's music that
originated outside the United States or Europe being drawn into this
dialectical tension on a truly international scale. In many ways, its success
in the mid-1950s was a harbinger of the kind of globalization of non-Western
popular musics that was to become a major trend in the late twentieth
century. Meanwhile, back in the Costa Rican bar, our
North American amigo's rendition of Belafonte's faux-calypso reminds us of
the challenges we face in interpreting local music styles once they have been
transplanted to new locales as a result of transnational migration and the
power of the international media. To whom, after all, does "Day-O"
belong, and what does it really mean? Should the most famous
"calypso" of all time be understood as a quintessentially Jamaican
peasant melody, a pan-Caribbean ballad, a denatured work song, an urban folk
anthem, a quasi-calypso pop tune, a sentimental refrain for nostalgic West
Indians living abroad, a tropical diversion for tourists, or a little of each
of these? Or has it become just another shallow and meaningless eddy in the
chaotic postmodern swirl? Nearly fifty years after "Day-O" launched
America's short-lived calypso craze, its echoes are still heard around the
world, seducing us into new conversations about what happens when music
crosses borders. —Kenneth Bilby Smithsonian Institution |
