STOP! You imperfect speaker!

As we all know, Carnival is a barometer, the mirror of the society. The tempo, the feel of the mass, reflects the society. Art imitating life imitating art: evolving through the centuries, Carnival has at times provided the means for various styles of self-expression and a ready vehicle for confrontation, which could be played out between the competing revellers themselves or against the authorities.

Carnival bands were by their origins aggressive, led by chantwells who encouraged the stickmen, who were, in turn, enervated by the music, which, together with the heat and the rum, also drove the crowds, both members and onlookers, into a frenzy.

Carnival for the outsider is often unnerving in its disorder and abandon. To the European of the 1880s, the dancing was nothing but the most disgusting obscenity, "being an imitation more or less vigorous and lustful by the male and female performer of the motions of the respective sexes in the act of coition".

The contemporary writer goes on to add that together with the rum and the excitement, "performers and spectators then disperse with their passions excited to go and put into immediate practice the immoral lessons they have been greedily imbibing." Ent.

Undoubtedly, there was a grain of truth in this observation. But there was more to it than that. The portrayals expressed the grandeur of the imagination of a subject people, yearning for the "other". Let's go and look at mas in 1937.

Dressed in several textures of black, his shoes replicas of coffins, his very wide-brimmed hat a castle of crossed destinies, armed with cutlasses, knives and pistols, his face painted white like a skull, his whistle rings loud above the surrounding noise, his prey embarrassed in their uncostumed role of spectator grin sheepishly, trying to edge away, but already a small crowd has gathered and they now find themselves as a part of street theater, protagonist, antagonist and audience -

"STOP! You imperfect speaker! Stop!

Drop your keys and bend you knees,

and call me the Prince of Darkness, Criminal Master.

I have no compassion. In this time of execution,

Master of Masters, King of Kings,

man who can compel men and women to die,

I following the star of the unconquered will,

which makes me inexorable and unbeaten still,

as a burning diadem upon my breast,

invulnerable and calm and self-possessed.

Now my fabulous verses will befuddle your dunce head.

I will have fun and I will give you rocks for bread.

So stand and deliver all the "King's Head" (pennies)

that jangle in your pocket or I will blast your tail like a rocket!"

The crowd, much larger now, applauds. The undisguised shuffle and pay up. They seek to escape, for another robber is on the way, dressed from head to foot in red with tiny silver mirrors sparkling in the brilliant light of noon. From the distance, loud cracks like gunshots. The crowd shout and scatters.

"Jab Jab!" shouts a boy. "Look they coming from Erthig Road!"

In the clearing crowd appear three tall, strapping men dressed in red and yellow tights. Golden hearts cover their chests, and they wear jester's hats like horns, tipped with bells. Their trousers' ends are also sequined with bells, and bells surround their waists. They wield 15 foot long bull whips that crack the sky. Their eyes are wild. Men, women and children flee before their impertinence!

Now what's that smell? Oh Lord no! I thought they would stay in Jouvay. They must have slept out last night - it's a Pissenlit band. these dreadful people have soaked nighties in urine for days or weeks and are wearing them. Run, they coming to rub up on you! Run, quick!

"Look, look what is that?"

It's bats - a bat band on roller skates, all dressed in gray and brown fur, huge wings catching the breeze. Look, one little boy bat! He is jumping, trying to fly. How fantastic! Their masks so real, like bats.

Moko Jumbies always have a dwarf with them to make them look even taller, stalking on stilts 15 or 20 feet above the crowd, dressed in striped pants, a wide skirt and a colourful shirt. They wear torshon for a hat and carry a small umbrella. They collect money from the people in the upstairs windows, but have to be careful about electric wires.

Oh, how cute! Look a baby doll band, all dressed in pink and blue with lots of fru-fru and baby powder! How sweet - what that he's drinking from his bottle? Rum! And look that one, it look like curry running down his legs out of his diapers. What's that he wants to show you? A shilling to see Cain and Abel - well, there it is in a little black box, a piece of cane and a bell.

Carnival is something else again, yes. Oh, look a truck disguised as a radio full of pretty girls! They all work at Rediffusion, Trinidad , you know.

Come let's go and see what Mr. Strasser playing this year. I hear he's coming out from Victoria Square. Last year he played a penny, a huge thing about 12 foot high. No one could see him until he stepped out from where he had formed a part of Britannia.

Look, there is something coming - it's Strasser. Everybody say it's Strasser. What is that - a stamp? Strasser playing six-pence stamp, a huge red stamp depicting Raleigh at the Pitch Lake! How real - look the detail, perfect! It's made of painted cloth with black and gold appliqués. Where is Strasser? He must be there - oh look, he's climbing up onto the float and he's gone, he has disappeared the moment he walked past it, he just stopped still and vanished - how fantastic! I want to see the Seven Ages of Man, they coming out from by Norville's drugstore. That so far, come go.

We go take a drink by Crown Lion Bar. Ah hear they have stick fight tonight!  Look, Mahalle. Eh, Mahalle, give us a drop! - "Not in this car, it not for hiring, it's a private vehicle," he said, slipping into first and driving off his invisible car just missing the orange man.

Patrick Jones and them fellers playing Beelzebub and the Forty Thieves. That is devil mas! They have a Satan with a face, almost as big as you. Eleven devils chained together in the everlasting darkness. Gilbert Scamaroni is plying the beast from the apocalypse, chained to female imps dressed in red with shimmering wings. They have a dance - very sexy. Look skullboxman, bookman, keyman and bellman, and Lucifer the Demon straight from hell. Shiffer Fabien father is play that. They does meet in Lapeyrouse to practice that mas every night for nine nights before Carnival! They collect dead dogs and boil them till they get the bones. Look he have a dog's skull round his neck and look that one have a cowfoot. Take care, they will throw the water they boil the dead dogs in on you. If that hit you, you blight for life!

Look the Belmont tram coming. Let we go by Crown Lion, ah could take a beer.

And several years later:

"Invaders beating sweet - ah ha

Coming down Park Street,

Tokyo coming up, beating very slow

and when the two bands clash

if you see cutlass

never me again to jump up in a steelband in Port of Spain!"

Who celebrated Carnival?

Carnival in Trinidad has grown out of the collective experience of all people who have come to this island from Spanish times, prior to 1797, on through to the present day. 

Carnival is essentially Roman Catholic in origin. Its earliest participants must have been the Spanish settlers who, in isolation, living in the little hamlets bearing beautiful names like San José de Oruna and Puerto de los Hispanioles, would have danced the medieval “burroquete” in the muddy streets accompanied by guitar, fiddle and drum. The local Amerindians must have been looking on in amazement.

 Hardly drawing a crowd, the pre-Lenten fiesta would have been at most a dozen or so people dressed in rags, alpagattas and battered straw hats. The priests, the Governor, the chief of police, and of course the donkey costumes into which a man or boy got to prance about, waving the little ass’ head from side to side, making mincing steps in a parody of riding merrily. The burroquete mas is ancient, having its origins in north Africa and finding itself marooned in Spain after the withdrawal of the Moors in the 1490s. Eventually, it was brought to the New World.  

In the period before 1783, before the influence of the French and Africans, it has been suggested that the population was as follows:

Spanish white - 126

Coloured - 245

Slaves - 310

Amerindians (Carib) - 2000 

 

With the Cedula of Population of 1783, a dramatic change took place.  The island, though a Spanish colony, received a French population. These French, made up largely of the petit noblesse of France’s southern provinces, brought with them many slaves. They came mostly from Dominica, St. Vincent, Martinique and Grenada. Amongst them were a great number of people of colour, who were not enslaved. Those were the descendants of earlier French settlers and African slaves. The institution of slavery was then seen by Europeans and Africans, by Christians and Muslims, as an economic reality. It meant that these free black people who came to Trinidad possessed slaves as well.  

 

The population of Trinidad just before the British conquest in 1797 was as follows:

Spanish white: 150

Spanish coloured: 200

Africans enslaved: 300

Amerindians: 1127

French white: 2250

French coloured: 4700

African enslaved: 9700

 

Being almost entirely Catholic in their faith, the French in Trinidad just like the Spaniards observed Lent and celebrated Carnival. It is said that the French combined an aristocratic tradition and their natural tendency to “contagious gaiety, brilliant verbal sally and comic buffoonery” in their version of Carnival. This gave the festival a different flair altogether. Historians say that this period of Trinidad’s development, that is, the 1790s, was marked by a certain degree of racial ease. In as much as both the whites and the free coloureds were sharing the frontier town experience, having freshly immigrated, there was an atmosphere of modest mingling. In fact, there was a lot of so-called ‘miscegenation’ taking place! It was only with the advent of the British conquerors that this changed. 

 

Carnival celebrations of the turn of the 19th century were enjoyed by both groups of the population. But what of the several thousand slaves?

 

Port of Spain had then a large slave population which acted as domestics. What of the hundreds of slaves who moved about on their masters’ business, as messengers, sailors, wagon drivers, etc.? According to tradition, they took no part in Carnival. A memory by Ofuba the chantwell, a slave who sang “Neg deye polla” has been preserved, picturing a slave peeping from behind the door at the Carnival fête of the French masters (“Nègre derrière la porte”).

 

By the 1820s, during Governor Woodford’s term, the free persons of colour were subjected to very stringent regulations, and although it was not forbidden to wear masks, they were compelled to keep to themselves and never presumed to join the amusements of the privileged class.

 

The Caribs were moving in their own world, their own time and space. Their rapidly diminishing share in the population did not share in the realities of the European and African immigrants, who in turn may not have noticed them particularly.  

 

A description of a Carnival ball has come down to us. Mrs. Bruce’s ball in 1831 was attended by “the beauty and fashion of Port of Spain, composing a motley assemblage of elegantly dressed ladies, largely Swiss damsels, French marquises, English noblemen, grooms, postillions, priests and friars” (the latter costumes have been banned since then). The French also disguised as their servants and slaves, their husbands and mistresses. One costume was the graceful and costly one of the “mulatresse” of the time, whilst gentlemen adopted that of the “nègres du jardin” (in Patois ‘neg jardin’) or field  labourer. In that costume the gentleman often figured in the “bamboola” in the “giouba” and in the “calinda”, all popular local dance steps of the era. 

 

The French would often unite in bands, their faces blackened with soot, representing different estates. Lionel Fraser, who wrote a history of Trinidad, relates:

“In the days of slavery, whenever a fire broke out upon an estate, the slaves of the surrounding properties were immediately mustered and marched to the spot, horns and shells were blown to collect them and the gangs were followed by drivers cracking their whips and urging them with cries and blows to their work. After emancipation, the negroes began to represent this scene as a kind of commemoration of the change in their condition and the procession of ‘cannes brulées’ used to take place on the night of the 1st of August, the date of emancipation.” 

 

In later years, the practice of cannes brulées was used at a different time of year to inaugurate Carnival. With emancipation, social life was altered between the free black people and the slaves. The ancient lines of demarcation between them as classes were obliterated. Fraser remarks:

“As a natural consequence, the Carnival degenerated into a noisy and disorderly amusement of the lower classes. The earliest record of an attempt to regulate or control Carnival appears in 1833. An attempt was made by Mr. Peake (assistant to the chief of police) to check the shameful violation of the Sabbath by the lower order of the population who are accustomed about this time of year to wear masks and created disturbances on a Sunday.” 

 

Peake arrested several people. On returning to his home, he found that all his windows had been broken. 

African Songs to Calypso

When the African slaves began to arrive in small quantities, that is, before the French people brought them in greater numbers in the 1780’s, they had found a form of singing. They took up local songs and of course sang their own songs too. Sampson says “they introduced more pep, more vigour, more liveliness and more animation”.
Mitto Sampson was able to draw from the memories of “old timers”, such as famous sportscaster Ken Laughlin’s father and Tony de Boissière, who knew a lot about the French Creole tradition of the origins of calypso.
Long ago, in the 1780s, a certain Frenchman by the name of Begorrat had a big estate in Diego Martin. There were many caves up in the mountains, and “Lawa” (King) Begorrat used to hold court in one of them, “to which he would adjourn with his favourite slaves and guests on occasions and indulge in a variety of entertainments,” says Mitto. Well, that is putting it mildly!
In Begorrat’s courtly cave would be his African slave singers of “cariso” or “caiso”, which were usually sung ex temporare and were of a flattering nature, satirical or directed against unpopular neighbours or members of the plantation community, or else they were “mepris”, a term given to a war of insults waged between two or more expert singers.
Gros Jean, or Big John, was a slave belonging to the Begorrat family. He was the first of these bards or “chantwells” to be appointed master of caiso or “Maît Caiso”.
Begorrat was a man who had many wives. Whenever he was vexed, the women would send for Gros Jean to sing him back to serenity. Begorrat, it is said, liked to think of himself as a monster, pitiless, destructive, and terrifying. A patois song he liked went like this:

Begorrat est diab’la, c’est un
Begorrat est diab’la, c’est deux
Begorrat for, cruel et mauvais
Begorrat roi-la dans son pays.

Gros Jean and Begorrat had a close relationship, so close that one of the wives of Begorrat poisoned Gros Jean. It is said that when Begorrat heard the news of his death, he first fainted, then raged and cursed, then swore. He did not eat for three days. He had Gros Jean’s body wrapped in a flaming red cloth and put a gold cross on his forehead, and buried him in the family grave on the estate. Another chantwell on the estate sang:

Gros Jean, you have a voice like thunder
Your voice can raise my mother from the dead.

So So also had a real good voice and succeeded Grow Jean as Maît Caiso. Begorrat discovered him and promoted him to this high position. It was said of him that he had a taste for “wrinkled and decrepit women ... and making his house a cross between a hospital and a house of refuge”. Thus, bringing into the vocabulary of Patois the word “so so” for one who seeks lovers amongst the aged, he was known to be a good, generous and sometimes quite religious man. Begorrat had him sing terrible songs against his enemies, and in so doing met his death in a terrible manner that may not be described in theses pages. It is said that one of his murderers confessed on his deathbed, naming two others, Fouchet and Dardaine, who in turn were tortured to death in revenge.
The third great calypsonain that we know about is Papa Cochon (Daddy Pig). He is remembered perhaps more as a notorious obeah man. He had the power of finding gold.  There was quite a quantity of buried treasure around Trinidad in the 1800s. People who had money, gold, silver, precious stones, would bury it in times of danger or if they had to go away for a while. Then, for various reasons, they would leave it. Sometimes they were killed or died otherwise. Papa Cochon, through his dreaming ability, is reported to have discovered large quantities of pirate gold for his masters on Manzanilla Beach and at Mucurapo. He whistled, and the birds flew to him. He prayed snakes to death and mad dogs grew docile in his presence. He is reputed to have saved the lives of many. He would concoct a potion made from the blood of a young female slave, the brain of a black cat, sea water and two dead crapauds. He could transfer the suffering from one person to another. While preparing for his obeah work, he ate snakes and dogs, slept in graveyards, allegedly to hold meetings with the dead. It is thought that he belonged to Henri “Diable” Boissière. When they came to Begorrat’s court to sing against rival chantwells, Begorrat always got predictions from Papa Cochon. One day, Papa Cochon was invited to sing at the estate of a certain French family whose name begins with “L”, and was never seen again. Rumours had it that he had been locked up in an underground room and starved to death.
On this manner ended the life of the third great calypsonian, Papa Cochon, arch gossiper and scandal monger, impostor and chantwell. It was said by Mitto Sampson that his scarlet life hung like a black cloud over the period of slavery.
The fourth famous chantwell, Danois (the Dane), was not a slave. He may have come from the Virgin Islands. We are now in the 1850s, and from then on, many chantwell’s names have come down to us. Possum, son of the slave Ofuba, Hannibal the Mulatto, Surisima the Carib, of whom we spoke earlier, and Cedric le Blanc, the famous white calypsonian. Picong was always on the rough side. Zandolie, for example, sang:

Hannibal, your mother was a prostitute
I am singing the truth.
Hannibal was born in jail.

Hannibal was the mulatto son of Soucoush Piwi and an African carterman. He enjoyed poking fun at black people. He himself was a dandified, fair-skinned man, with slicked-down hair, two-toned shoes, black walking stick with a silver handle, pin-striped suits and ruffled shirts. He sang:

Black and black make pure devil
Black and white make half angel.

Outside of the thin veneer of Victorian respectability, mostly imposed by the English upon themselves, Trinidad’s creole life was one of considerable social disorder. Rumours would sweep the town like the one of the nun and the leper.

Black, white and mixed-race people lived in an ongoing near orgy of six, crime, rum and ribald songs. This was placed against a highly developed sense of sin which as Catholics they cherished. All this had evolved in Trinidad from the heritage of slave dancing societies, and the relationships between masters and slaves, which eventually evolved into Carnival bands. One can say that with the arrival of the French planters, the history of Carnival may be divided into four phases, viz slavery, the time right after emancipation, the end of the 19th century and a period from the 1890s to after the First World War. Carnival in slavery days was a white people affair. After emancipation, the ex-slaves took it over, mostly with depictions of burning cane plantations. The end of the 19th century almost saw the end of Carnival, which only survived because of the pressure put upon it by the British authorities who felt sufficiently strong to want to impose their ways. The more they tried to stop it, the more is sprung to life. The advent of the 20th century gave Carnival an even more important audience. The emerging middle class loved it. In the period after the First World War, it was motorized, amplified and participated in by thousand of movie-goers. The transition from the mad old days of bambula and tamboo bamboo was made with the increasing addition of modern musical forms and instruments.
Wire masks imported from as far afield as Austria served to hide the faces of the respectable ladies. Bands were roped off to prevent intruders and eventually ended up on the backs of trucks.

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Behave Bad!

In Trinidad, there is a long tradition of “bacchanal” connected to a festival or holiday. Anil Sookdeo from the John Hopkins University, Baltimore, in his paper “Festivals and Plantations: The Misrule of Carnival and Hosay” explains why.

In the years of their popularisation, both Carnival and Hosay were lower class festivals. Carnival had not started out as such, when it was brought to Trinidad by the French plantocrats. However, after the abolition of slavery in 1834, the former slaves started to participate in the festival and soon take it over completely. The “jamette” Carnival dominated the pre-Lenten festivities towards the end of the 19th century, leaving out the middle and upper classes completely.

Hosay, on the other hand, was limited to the Indian indentured population. As such, it was - similar to the Carnival celebrations of the second half of the 19th century - not a festival that was participated in by middle and upper class creoles and the British administrators. The latter had a mighty lot of difficulties with the raucous festivals in Trinidad! Both Carnival and Hosay were oftentimes occasions of clashes between lower class behaviour and higher class ideas of how citizens should behave.

Anil Sookdeo puts forward two reasons for these clashes. Firstly, the two festivals were “used as surrogate vehicles for ‘organised’ action in the interests of those excluded from power and privilege”. The borderlines between feteing and protesting got blurred. Secondly, Sookdeo argues that there was a general atmosphere of contesting of the British administration in those years, which was vented in upheavals during the festivals.

Much research has been done on the misrule and non-conformist behaviour during Carnivals all over the world. Trinidad is certainly not alone in this. In fact, the success of Carnival throughout the centuries and its continuing attractiveness to people is its bacchanalian nature. It seems to always have been an occasion of expressing oneself against an established social or political order. This is, according to sociologists, necessary to actually upkeep and maintain a healthy community along those very lines that are being criticised in Carnival.

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They start practising again - the Steelband

Take a rusty, discarded oil drum, a heavy cannon ball, a blazing fire, a hammer for the fine-tuning, plenty noise, a pair of strong arms and a pair of good ears, surrounded by a bunch of "youts" from the neighbourhood - and you get a sound that is so soft and tinkling that it could be the soundtrack to Peter Pan's flying fairy. Or, it could be a thundering sound, pounding in your ears like a horde of Mongols thundering with their horses over the steppes of Tadjikistan.

The steelband is, in the best sense, a child of the oil age, both as a musical and as a social phenomenon. It is a 20th century phenomenon, and as such has become a part of history. But let us go 8 decades back, to the 1930s.

It was a hard time in Trinidad, as it was elsewhere in the world. The great depression in the United States had also affected the British crown colony. The British Empire dragged on like a wounded elephant. England's economy was not buoyant, which meant that her raw-material producing colonies saw their markets dwindling.

In Trinidad, thousands of people had no work. Tens of thousands of others were employed at hunger wages by sugar companies or in the oil fields. It was hard for the local population to see the foreign managers live in relative wealth and distinctive comfort, whilst Trinidadians saw their children hungry, without shoes or not able to afford school books.

However, people were far from being apathetic. For about 50 years now, the local reform movement had been attracting brave hearts and bright minds, who tried to walk the fine line between illegal sedition and necessary speaking up for His Majesty's subjects. Inspired by the Russian Revolution and Marcus Garvey's black nationalism, the reform movement and the budding union movement was relevant for Trinidadians of all skin tones and many social backgrounds, who sought social justice for themselves and for their countrymen and women.

They called their demonstrations "Hunger Marches", bringing to a point what it was all about. Retrenchment, undignified and unsanitary housing conditions, a lack of education and future prospects were things that the majority of the people had to live with in those years (not only in Trinidad, it must be remembered, but in the western world all over). It was not only workers who took to the streets, bringing sugar production and oil production to a halt, but also members of the educated black and coloured middle classes, who had been the true Creole backbone of the colony for many generations.

People like Elma Francois, Captain A.A. Cipriani and Uriah Butler emerged in the political arena. Civic courage was contagious: the calling for local representation gave birth to a whole artistic movement, a first independent Trinidadian expression, in particular in the writing arena: C.L.R. James, Alfred Mendes, Ralph de Boissière to name just a few. A couple years later, also Albert Gomes, who excelled in both, the political and the writers vocation. Free-thinking newspapers came on the scene, first and foremost "The Beacon".

The emergence of the steelband towards the end of the 1930s can be seen as a noisy, rhythmical, carnevalesque interpretation of what was left for local people: scraps (in this case scrap metal). At the beginning, it was not more than percussion, getting together and making noise with brake pads, biscuit tins and other metal pieces. But quickly, the tins got “tuned”, and the bigger oil drums started to be used.

Steelband became yet another musical expression of the African diaspora, and as such a part of that 20th century musical phenomenon that influenced popular music like no other. In the Caribbean, African musical expressions mixed with the relevant European administrative culture, creating such distinct genres like merengue and rumba in the Spanish islands, bele and compas in the French Antilles, and reggae and calypso in the British West Indies. With the exception of reggae, it is interesting how localised those artforms remained: just listen to your radio in Trinidad and try to find Cuban mambo or Martiniquan zouk!

Steelband, however, is not a musical genre, and was able to “travel”, so much so that the whole Caribbean now identifies with it as a folk artform. It seems to have been just what the tourist industry and the media needed!

The emergence of the Steelband is closely linked with Carnival. Carnival, a Catholic custom, was brought to Trinidad by the French settlers in the 1780s. At first, the African slaves were not permitted to participate in the celebrations and masked balls of the French families. However, they were allowed to celebrate “canboulay”, when lit torches were carried through the street to mark the end of the sugar cane harvest - a custom which has been recently adopted in the popular “Crop Over” Festival of Barbados.

Before the abolition of slavery in 1834, the life of the African slaves did not take place in a cultural vacuum, however. The dominant culture of Trinidad was French, albeit the fact that the administration was British since 1797. Syncretic cultural expressions like Shango, Santeria and Voodoo (mixed of Catholicism and the African pantheon) are as much part of this syncretism as are Carnival, stickfight, bele dancing and other folklore that have their roots in the first decades of the 19th century. Steelband can be seen as a 20th century extension of that syncretism, albeit with other parameters: trash from the industrial society was used in a rebellious movement against a ruling ethnical minority.

With emancipation, Carnival changed dramatically. The former slaves and their offspring started to participate in it. The first “noisy” devices were added to revelries: kettles, salt boxes, chac-chacs etc. Carnival definitely lost its “polite” upper class touch immediately! The Europeans started to shun this kind of Carnival, which they called “Jamette Carnival”, the Carnival of those beyond the circle of polite society. Stick fighters, shantwells, drummers, prostitutes and bad johns! This was only to change towards the turn of the 20th century, when the “upper classes” once again took part in the festival.

With this, the Trini Carnival was quickly approaching a format that was to last for another century. Competitions were held in the various categories, and the raucousness of the street festival often clashed with the ideas of the British authorities as how His or Her Majesty’s subjects should behave!

Steelband started in 1937 or 1938, when “Alexander Ragtime Band” from Newtown, formerly the Calvary Tamboo Bamboo Band, came out to play. Their leader was “Lord Humbugger” Forde. The pans were made of paint tins, biscuit tins, linseed oil tins, carbide pans, zinc buckets and dustbin cover. Tuned into two notes, they were beat furiously and rhythmically together with the tamboo bamboo. What a novelty! What a spectacle! No wonder it caught!

A year later, the pan craze brought forth many more steelbands, all from depressed areas with great poverty. Inspired by the American cinema, the tradition of bombastic names was started: Destination Tokyo, Sun Valley, Hellyard, Cross of Lorraine, Red Army. It was the eve of World War II, which also was reflected in the steelband names.

From 1942 to 1945, Carnival was banned due to the war. It seems to have been a gestation period for the steelband. When in 1945 victory was celebrated by the allied forces and Trinidadians had a spontaneous Carnival in the middle of the year, steelbands joined in the street party with much refined instruments. The dudups of the pre-war days was joined by the first tenor pans made of oil drums, called “ping pong”.

From then on, there was no turning back for the development of this instrument. Socially, the steelband went the way of a lot of popular music of the second half of the 20th century. Much like ragtime, jazz, rock & roll, it all started with a couple rebellious youths from depressed urban areas, and ended up some 50 years later in dignified symphonic orchestra halls, carrying Trinidad’s indigenous musical genre (calypso) far beyond the island’s shores.

Calypso, Calypso Music

The 1940s were one of those significant times in Trinidad and Tobago's history. In a very real sense, they marked the end of an epoch, and the commencement of another. The period that came to an end was 'the old time days'. A slow-paced, patois-speaking island, where everybody certainly knew everybody else, and where the events of the day passed from mouth to ear with the easy familiarity of village life.

There was a club called the 'Long Tom Cigar Smoking Club of Almond Walk' that met early every morning outside Mouttet's on what is now Broadway, smoke, drink coffee, and talk about the latest news. This club, mentioned in Bodu's '....' and referred to by Col. Collens is worth knowing. Old-time calypsonians like Executor belonged there, as well as the Jones' of Duncan Street who were first to play 'dragon mas', but also such luminaries as old Mr. Gaston-Johnson and José Bodu. They ran old-time Carnival. ... Carnival competition downtown was the event!

Our story begins around 1903. It concerns a young girl of a prominent creole family. Well brought up, gentle, she had attended the Catholic Convent for young ladies in Port of Spain. Soon after leaving school, she met a man. He was from an entirely different background, and was described by people who knew his as "ne'er do well" and "just a common man in the street".

Distracted by passion, blind with love, she left her home and moved in with this person and lived with him for some time. After a years or so, he put her out on the streets and she became a lady of the night, a streetwalker. Naturally in a small community, that was sensational!

Those were the circumstances around which a song was created. The song was called "L'année passée". The composer was Lionel Belasco. Forty-odd years later, with the world at war, this melody with new lyrics became one of the most popular songs of the war years. It celebrated a lifestyle, the change in the overall society of our island. It was called "Rum and Coca Cola", and was rendered by the Andrew Sisters, the most famous singing group of the day to perhaps millions of servicemen all over the world.

The composer, Lionel Belasco, was the most accomplished musician in Trinidad. Growing up in Duke Street, he had lived from his childhood in a musical environment. His mother had been a concert pianist and music teacher. He started to composed at the age of 12, and had written over the years hundreds of waltzes, ballads, pasillos, calypsos and rumbas, becoming the foremost composer in the West Indies. Belasco toured a lot with his own band from Cuba to Belize. The American Victor Recording Company recognised his talent and in 1914 sent technicians to Trinidad to record his band at the London Electric Cinema, which later became the Astor. Belasco later appeared at Carnegie Hall and Grand Central Palace, on National Radio and in several motion pictures made by Paramount. He was a serious artist, but never lost his whimsical charm and sense of humour. He still thought that a woman's extended hand was for kissing, not for shaking.

During his stay in the United States, Lionel, or 'Lanky' as he was known, had made the acquaintance of an impresario by the name of Maurice Baron. Together, they produced many songbooks and collections of written music, which they published and copyrighted in the 1910s in New York.

It was suggested in court that "Rum and Coca Cola" had been lifted from a song in a folio published by them, entitled 'Calypso Songs of the West Indies'. The legal task before the lawyer representing Baron and Belasco was not an easy one. The charge was plagiarism - that a literary or musical work has been stolen from its real creator. When physical or tangible property is stolen, it changes hands. The owner is no longer in possession of it. But when a melody is copied, the owner still has it, and so has the thief! Furthermore, the 'stolen goods' can be disguised by some changes and be presented as an original work. After all, there are only 7 notes in the diatonic scale and 12 notes in the chromatic scale, and in spite of coincidence and the miracle of infinite permutations, one can always demonstrate a prior similarity to a least a snatch of a few lines. To win a plagiarism suit, the plaintiff must establish no merely some similarity with his own prior work, but substantial copying therefrom, as one legal expert put it. And this was precisely what was undertaken in the Baron and Belasco case by the New York firm of attorneys at law. What ensued was to be a landmark case. Baron's and Belasco's lawyers were not bothered with the lyrics of the song, whose origins were not their concern per se.

Lord Invader is credited as having written the words for "Rum and Coca Cola". When Belasco was asked why he did not take action against Lord Invader, he replied that "he was a brother". Perhaps Lanky and Invader met on Broadway one morning and decided that a sad thing was happening, and remembered 'L'année passée' as history repeating itself? In any event, the case was the music. Maurice Baron had written the harmony for "L'année passée". In court, he pointed out that it had sixteen chords and that "Rum and Coca cola" had fourteen identical chords, in the same places and in the same consecutive order.

But most significant of all of the chords written by him was one that was 'musically harsh', so to speak. It was deliberately made so to give a dramatic effect to the French world 'fille' (little girl) in "L'année passée", and thus emphasized the contrast between an innocent girl and the streetwalker she became in the following year, an event that had occured in 1903.

The same dissonant or out chord was found in the identical same spot in "Rum and Coca Cola". There was no reason for its existence there. the copier had left his calling card. The song had been first sung by Jeri Sullovan at the Versailles Night club in New York. It made an impact. The Andrews Sisters recorded it and 200,000 copies were sold, citing Mory Amsterdam as the composer on the record jacket. Maurice Baron and Lionel Belasco won their case, and were paid handsomely.,

The war years, from 1939 to 1945, were a watershed period in Trinidad and Tobago, one which were marked by the lyrics of these two calypsos:

"Since the Yankees come to Trinidad

They have the young girls going mad.

The young girls say they treat them nice

Make Trinidad like Paradise.

They buy Rum and Coca Cola

Go down Point Cumana

Both mother and daughter

Working for the Yankee dollar."

The Mighty Sparrow sang ten years after the war:

"Well the girls in town feeling sad,

No more Yankees in Trinidad,

They going to close down the base for good,

Dorothy have to make what she could.

All of them who use to make style

Taking anything with a smile."

19th Century Carnival

Carnival today continues much as it has done for the last two hundred years of its evolution in Trinidad - a national exercise in joy and creativity, harmony and togetherness. Carnival is daring and inventive - long may it reign!

The 1890s Carnival went through one of its many phases in colonial Trinidad. Originating in both the traditions of Western Africa and the Latin countries of the Mediterranean, Carnival became a pre-Lenten festival: Saturnalia for the god Saturn, Bacchanalia for the wine-god Bacchus, was brought to Trinidad by the Spaniards in the mid-17th century and by the French in the 1780s.

Thr Africans in the 18th century, both enslaved and free, had memories of the tribal ballad songs, sung at market fairs and in the various courts of their kings. Those songs were in praise of their rulers, or sometimes to win the favour of some visiting potentate. In Africa, the people shouted:’Kaiso’, a word meaning ‘Well done’.

When on Emanciaption day in August 1834 the former slaves joined the free coloureds and free Africans in the French Mardi Gras, Carnival evolved from being a round of fetes and balls to a street festival with spectacular parades termed ‘canboulay’ (cane burnt). These bands were led by ‘batoniers’, fierce stick fighters with the drums of the calenda ringing in their ears, and the songs of the chantuelles evoking in their hearts the valour of their ancestors.

To the polite members of society, these were the savage and degrading aspects of Carnival, the occupation of the ‘diametre’ (jamette) or those beyond the diameter of society. It was largely because of these forms, now almost disappeared, that Carnival was almost brought to an end.

In those days the Carnival ran for three weeks and may be said to have begun with the end of the Christmas festivities on the feast of Epiphany. The Spanish Parangueros blended into the rest of society for a series of fetes, balls and street parades, all coming to an end with the beginning of Lent and the season of fasting and abstinence and, no doubt, many ‘mea culpas’.

A feature that distinguished the Carnival of the 19th century was the use of masks. The festival was then being referred to as a ‘masquerade’. The music was supplied by the African banjos and the local string bands, goat skin drums, conch shells and later bamboo cut to varying lengths (tambu bambu) and struck on the ground or beaten with sticks, thus providing the percussion. The steelband was not to appear on the scene until the early 1940s.

The Origin of Trinidad Carnival

Carnival in Trinidad is rooted in historical irony. Just at a time when the British conquered the island in 1797, and Sir Thomas Picton started to impose a very puritan and austere governance with iron military rule, the catholic festival gained impetus.

“The French were never in possession of the island by virtue of discovery or conquest,” writes Andrew Carr in ‘Book of Trinidad’. “But they migrated to the island in such numbers that they exercised a cultural dominance in the society.” In terms of Carnival, this cultural dominance fell on fertile ground: the French settlers’ neighbours were of Spanish descent and were quite familiar pre-lenten celebration. ‘Burrokeet’, a distinctly Spanish mas which came to Spain out of North Africa, depicts after the Roman wine-god Bacchus riding on his donkey to the ‘bacchanalia’!

In the 17th century, Carnival in Trinidad must have looked like that: five or six young men dressed up as burrokeet (these probably comprising the priest, two or three Farfan cousins and a Robles or Lopez), roaming the streets in San José de Oruna, visiting the fourteen or so thatched-roof houses where their friends lived, and dancing, eating and drinking on this warm Tuesday night, the great forest closing round, enjoying the merriment before the austerities of Ash Wednesday morning dawned.

This idyllic scene was definitely to change in 1783, when the French and Free Coloured settlers came to Spanish Trinidad under the Cedula of Population. The Spaniards at that time numbered 126 Europeans and 245 Free People of mixed European and African descent. When the British conquered Trinidad in 1797, a census numbered 2,151 people of European descent, 10,009 slaves of African descent, 4,467 free people of mixed descent and 1,082 Amerindians. Carnival in terms of private costume balls - the term ‘fete’ was coined then - was already popular among the white and coloured elite, as were dinners, balls, hunting parties and ‘fetes champetres’, outdoor picnics. Those festivities took place between Epiphany and Lent, coming to a culmination on ‘Mardi Gras’ (fat Tuesday).

“During this French period, in addition to the gay balls and parties, bands of individuals indulged in much frolic for some weeks before the Carnival Monday and Tuesday,” writes Carr. “Disguised and masked, and accompanied by musicians playing such instruments as the violin, guitar, cuatro, bandol, mandolin and chac-chac, they went on foot or in carriages to the homes of friends or on parade in the streets.”

The Amerindian people kept entirely aloof, Carr states further. African slaves were prohibited by law from taking part, except if an individual received special permission.

And what did the costumes in those pre-Emancipation days look like? People wore elegant disguises, like the French marquis, the English noblewoman and the Swiss damsel. Besides those, it was a time for the French planters to dress up like their servants: there were grooms and postillions, priests and friars. Some white women disguised themselves as the beautiful mulatresse their husbands so desired, while some of the slave masters dressed up like the garden labourers, the ‘neg jardin’.

When slavery was abolished in 1834, the aristocratic and exclusive character of Carnival disappeared, and it became a more popular affair. Black and coloured people started to participate in the canboulay parades. It must have come as a shock to the polite society, when the former slaves turned tables and dressed up in Carnival like Europeans, with white masks! The spirit of Carnival was thus completed; for two days each person could pretend to be the other, whose qualities they secretly or openly envied...

In the 1840s, Carnival bands started to form, mostly consisting of no more than a dozen people portraying characters. There were pirates and turks, wild Indians of South America (portrayed by Spanish peons from Venezuela), and even a personation of the Grim Reaper himself, with a skeleton painted on a tight-fitting black outfit. Some bands even did dramatic performances, with mock-beating and chain-pulling going on in the streets.

Yet, the years of the French cultural dominance had come to an end, and for the predominantly protestant British Victorian establishment Carnival was degenerate and undesirable. The authorities’ main goal of the coming decades became the maintaining of public order, almost a contradiction in terms to Carnival. Also, the population of Port-of-Spain grew dramatically in the decades after Emancipation. Between 1860 and 1880 it grew from 16,457 to 29,468 inhabitants. 40% of the latter number had been born outside of Trinidad and were not even aware of the catholic festival tradition.

In 1858, Governor Robert W. Keate prohibited the wearing of masks - something which to that day was an integral part of the ‘masquerade’. There was not a time, however, that Carnival aficionadoes didn’t find ways around any obstacle or prohibition: more and more masks were carried on sticks, a tradition which holds to this day, when no costume is complete without its ‘standard’.

Inspite of the attempts by the government to curb and suppress Carnival, the canboulay parades were increasingly taken over by people who came form the lower classes in east Port-of-Spain. The newspapers described this ‘Jamette Carnival’ as an “unremitting uproar, yealling, drumming and blowing of horns”. In 1881, Captain Arthur Baker on horseback lead a riot squad of the police charging into the masqueraders. It came to a massive riot, to this day remembered as the Canboulay Riots. The expert stickfighters, spurned on by the chantwells, proved to be quite a tough match for the policemen, who were themselves armed with batons! Many were injured on that fateful day.

By the 1890s, Carnival started to fade away from the wild days of the jamette society to the more competition-oriented middle-class festival it is today. Merchants began to realise that improvement of Carnival would eventually lead to economic benefits. At the turn of the century, the first competition for best-dressed band and individual was held on King Street (now Independence Square) by Town Councillor and merchant Ignacio Bodu. With prizes to be won, bands started to have more elaborate costumes, and all the better ones were lead by a King or Queen. The competition set the tone for the development of Carnival all through the 20th century.

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Some traditional mas

The Neg Jardin

In the mid-19th century, this was already considered a ‘traditional’ mas. The disguise by the white planter as the field slave was later adopted by the batonnier or stickfighter. The outfit consisted in jackets, worn by the ‘zom camisol’ (jacket men), trousers turned inside-out, belts strung with ribbons and handkerchiefs. The headties were called ‘fula’, from the French ‘foulard’. On Tuesday, the Neg Jardin came out in ‘kandal’, knee-long pants made of satin or velvet, alpagats (rope sandals), a bright shirt and a heart-shaped panel losely pinned on his chest called ‘fol’. The goal of the stick-fighter was to rip off his opponent’s ‘fol’ and thus win the fight.

Dame Lorraine

Dame Lorraine was played in the yards of the early mas camps, where the bands gathered at night before parading in the street. With huge padded breasts and buttocks, the Dame Lorraine ironically represents an elegant 18th century outfit of a French lady. Both men and women disguised as Dame Lorraine, engaging in mock plays and dances, and the haunting melody of the Dame still sends shivers down one’s spine:

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Pissenlit

Freely translated as the ‘stinker’, and you will soon see why! ‘Piss en lit’ is French for ‘wet the bed’, and in true J’ouvert tradition this mas was obscene and, well, smelly. During the jamette Carnival, this must have been the most objectionable character. Always played by a man, who dressed like a woman, wearing long, transparent nightgowns, the Pissenlit had with him menstruation cloths stained with red fluid. “They danced an early version of winin’, the rapid shifting of the pelvis.” writes Daniel Crowley in ‘Trinidad Carnival’. The Pissenlit also sang obscene songs and had a poui stick protruding between the legs, playing sexual horseplay. The mas did not survive in the 20th century.

Moko Jumbie

The Moko Jumbie or stilt walker is known throughout the West Indies. Sometime he is called John Canoe, and he may appear not only in Carnival, but also during Christmas. Sometimes accompanied by a dwarf to accentuate his height, the Moko Jumbie would parade in the streets, collecting money and flirting with the Creole ladies who watched the spectacle from the safe height of their wrought-iron balconies on the first floor! A Moko Jumbie sometimes ran into danger, too. In his lofty heights, his head was easily caught in the overhead electrical wires! Also, when the ladies on the first floor had a jealous guard, two strong hands might have pushed the stiltwalker over! In fact, there is an incident of a Moko Jumbie at Green Corner, who leant against the first-floor window of a pub at the Plaza Hotel at the northeastern corner, and got into a quarrel with a sailor in the pub. The sailor gave the Moko Jumbie a good push, and the poor stiltwalker fell diagonally across the intersection, splitting his head in two on the wall of Globe cinema!

Jab Molassi

The Jab Molassi (Molasses Devil) is one of the many devil masks of Carnival. When Emancipation came around and the former slaves were able to participate in the revelry, they brought with them satirical depictions of plantation life, the only life in the realm of their experience. Falling into a pot of boiling molasses had been the ultimate dread on a plantation, and the Jab Molassi interprets that. He wears short pants or old, frilled trousers with the legs cut off. A wire tail with a brush at the end protrudes from his backside, chains, horns, lock and keys complete the costume. Most importantly, this ‘Diable’ is smeared with molasses, grease, or mud.

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Lionel ‘Lanky’ Belasco - the Scott Joplin of Calypso

Amongst the truly great and almost forgotten figures of Trinidad music is Lionel Belasco. Born around 1881 to a musical family, his birthplace might have been Barbados, Venezuela or Trinidad. His mother was a piano teacher, his father, a Sephardic Jew, sang baritone, played organ and violin.

Although his parents tried their best to give little Lionel a classical musical training, the young man was more drawn towards roots music. He became a ‘gentleman stickfigher’, one of those ‘zom camisol’, middle-class men who wore jackets and accompanied the stickfighters.

At the turn of the 20th century, Port-of-Spain might well have been the most cosmopolitan place on earth, considering its small size. Syrians, Chinese, Portuguese, Indians, Europeans from various countries, Jews, Africans - everybody contributed, and ‘Lanky’ was exposed to the musical styles and festivals of the various ethnic groups, but most of all our own Creole culture.

The Belascos lived in Duke Street, not far from Laventille and Belmont, where African Orisha and Rada cults were still practiced. Fascinated with Afro-Caribbean and South American ritual music, Lionel began to compose at the age of twelve.

His preferred instrument was the piano, and like some of his middle-class contemporaries he “continued the bourgeois Creole tradition of modifying the sounds of outdoor Carnival for indoor performance”. By the early 1900s, Belasco’s band performed at get-togethers for the colonial elite, for example at Government House, and he taught piano to the Governor’s daughter.

Belasco always liked travelling. He got involved in the fledgling cinema business in Trinidad and in other places in the Caribbean and Guyana. In 1914, he made his first music recording in Trinidad for the American company Victor.

Shortly afterwards, there were rumours that Lionel’s lessons to the Governor’s daughter had gotten beyond the realm of piano playing. The girl was sent back to England, and Lionel went to New York. He was probably the first one who brought Trinidadian music to that city, recording frequently in his late teens and early twenties. He and Sam Manning became quite popular in New York City in the 1920s. Belasco accompanied vaudevillian Phil Madison in recordings, and recorded piano rolls for a company called QRS. Before the Great Depression, Lionel regularly returned to Trinidad to judge calypso competitions during Carnival. He picked up new songs, and went back to New York with his own interpretations to perform and record. He also recorded with Wilmoth Houdini, a chantwell from Trinidad whom he had admired greatly in his youth. Houdini became thus the first calypsonian since Julian Whiterose to be on record.

During those years, Belasco also ran a piano store in upper Manhattan. Aspiring musical stars from nearby Harlem, such as Fats Waller, used to drop by and practice on some of the instruments before going on a gig at night.

In 1933, Lionel decided to return to Trinidad. His arrangement with the Gokool brothers and lawyer Mikey Cipriani to establish a theatre in Port-of-Spain for him to manage went sour, and after losing a law suit against the Gokools, Lionel went back to the United States and continued his recording career there.

In the early 1940s, Lionel teamed with singer Massie Patterson. Together, they published a booklet of calypsoes called ‘L’Année Passée’. Belasco claimed he had published in it the 1900s. One of the songs, based on a Martiniquan folksong, which was copyrighted in his name, became later the most famous song of the World War II era: “Rum and Coca Cola”, sung by Lord Invader to a melody almost identical with Lionel Belasco’s tune from ‘L’Année Passée’. A famous lawsuit resulted from this, which Lionel won.

As he grew older, Belasco continued to tour and perform, but hardly recorded anymore. The greatest composer of West Indian music died in 1967 at the age of 85 in New York, leaving a legacy of some four hundred ballads, pasillos, waltzes, calypsoes and rumbas.

(Lionel Belasco’s recordings can be found on Rounder Records CD 1138, “Goodnight Ladies and Gents”)