The Immigrants (update)

A note from Nonesuch Records that Gaby Moreno and Van Dyke Parks’s album ¡Spangled! (which will include last year’s single, a cover of David Rudder’s “The Immigrants”) would be out soon, together with a lucky score (on my annual visit to Portland, Oregon) of a mint copy of the reissue of Parks’s pan-and-calypso-ful Clang of the Yankee Reaper, prompt me to make my first post in over a year.  The unrelenting horror of the current administration’s treatment of immigrants of color—all people of color, really—should have been the real motivation, I suppose.  But it’s all too easy to lose sight of that particular horror against the backdrop of a thousand others, not to mention the steady thrum of poisonous rhetoric that aids and comforts Aryan nationalist terrorists with guns.

I’ve written before about Parks’s cover of Tiger’s iconic “Money Is King,” and so has my friend and collaborator Ray Funk, who in his semi-retirement has become a regular (and prolific) correspondent for the T & T Guardian.  With his permission, and because the Guardian’s links tend to disappear capriciously, I’m sharing two of his recent pieces here.  The first was occasioned by former Carolina Chocolate Drop Leyla McCalla’s cover of “Money Is King” on her album Capitalist Blues:

Money is King TG 22 June 19 (click that link to view the pdf)

(Here’s the official video:)

The other concerns (take a deep breath) Carlos Santana’s cover of a Calypso Rose tune, “Abatina,” written by Kobo Town’s Drew Gonsalves in answer to Roaring Lion’s 1938 calypso “Tina.”  Santana’s version, retitled “Breaking Down the Door,” appears on his critically acclaimed comeback album Africa Speaks.

Here’s Santana, with vocalist Buika, performing “Breaking Down the Door” on the Jimmy Kimmel show:

Links to videos for Rose’s and Kobo Town’s versions are at the end of Ray’s feature (again, click the following link for a pdf):

Roaring Lion to Santana Trinidad Guardian 3 July 19

Two more bits of unrelated recent miscellany, in case another year goes by before I revisit this blog (!):

1. Billboard reports that Smithsonian Folkways has completed its acquisition of the Stinson Records archives, which among other things will complement its collection of calypso recordings from Emory Cook and Moe Asch, with whom Stinson had a fraught relationship.  (Complicated story.)  Only a brief notice so far at the Smithsonian’s own website; we’ll hope to hear more soon.
2. Documentarian Eve Goldberg has posted to YouTube her short film about Trinidadian-born piano virtuoso Hazel Scott, who was an enormous celebrity in the 1930s and 40s.  It’s entitled (appropriately) “What Ever Happened to Hazel Scott?“

 

The Immigrants

I’ve always been in the “Patriotism Is the Last Refuge of Scoundrels” camp.  And nothing makes me fume more than the mandatory display of Loyalty-to-Murca that precedes the first pitch of every U.S. baseball game.  Still, I hate to surrender the Fourth of July to the flag-waving, know-nothing, nativist MAGA mob. (In the New York Times, Professor Holly Jackson reminds us that Independence Day was once an occasion for protesting against social injustice.)

Thankfully, there’s national treasure and long-time calypsophile Van Dyke Parks, who has teamed up with the Guatemalan-American singer Gaby Moreno to resurrect David Rudder’s twenty-year-old anthem, “The Immigrants.”  With the gang of “zero-tolerance” zealots running things in Washington these days, the lyrics penned by Rudder, himself a migrant to Canada, are tragically timely.  Moreno, who immigrated to the U.S. eighteen years ago, gives them a heartfelt, hard-nosed reading, while Parks’s arrangement imbues the tune with a touch of (Randy) Newman-esque Americana.

You can purchase “The Immigrants” from Nonesuch Records (and all the usual online music vendors); sales will benefit the Central American Resource Center of California (CARECEN).

Calypso actually has a history with this sort of thing. In the 1940s, when Popular Front leftists fought a previous generation of nativists over the meaning of “Americanism,” “I Am An American Day,” celebrated each May in towns and cities large and small, effectively became a nationwide celebration of newly naturalized citizens from all parts of the world.  Along with other initiatives—National Brotherhood Week, radio shows such as Americans…All, popular songs like “The House I Live In” and “Ballad for Americans”—I Am An American Day promoted ethnic harmony and celebrated the contributions of immigrant groups to U.S. history and culture, as one way of contrasting American liberal ideals against the chauvinism of Europe’s fascist regimes.  Sir Lancelot headed the British West Indies committee at the 1943 ceremony in Los Angeles, while the Duke of Iron appeared on an episode of the syndicated radio program This Is Our Cause marking the 1944 observation.[1] In New York, 1944 also saw the first I Am An American Day Folk Festival at the Golden Gate Ballroom, sponsored by Harlem’s George Washington Carver Community School, a new adult education center founded by radical writer, artist, activist and educator Gwendolyn Bennett. The Duke performed, along with a score of other entertainers and politicians, at the festival’s second and third iterations in 1945 and 46. (By 1947, sadly, the school had been hounded out of existence by the House Un-American Activities Committee.)

Undated (1945) newspaper clipping and program, Cecil “Duke of Iron” Anderson Archives, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Cultures, New York Public Library

My friend and collaborator Ray Funk wrote a piece on “The Immigrants” for the Trinidad Guardian. You can also read what Felix Contreras has to say at NPR’s Alt.Latino, and revisit a 2009 profile of Van Dyke Parks for Crawdaddy by Denise Sullivan.

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[1] “U.S. Treasury Fetes Singer,” Pittsburgh Courier 3 July 1943: 21; review of “This Is Our Cause,” Billboard 31 July 1943: 12-13.  WINS, which aired “This Is Our Cause” in New York, was the flagship station of the broadcast division of reactionary media magnate William Randolph Hearst’s Independent News Service.  The program was billed as a weekly wartime “patriotic revue,” and it’s possible that Hearst fingered the Duke because of his 1939 patriotic paean “U.S.A.,” recorded with Gerald Clark for Varsity records. Needless to say, Hearst’s “cause”—nativist assimilationism rather than progressive internationalism—was not necessarily the Duke’s.  The lyrics of Duke’s calypso, written by fellow Trini expatriate (and Harlem M.D.) Walter Merrick, extolled the United States not only as a place of freedom , democracy, and material bounty, but as a haven for refugees and the home of Roosevelt’s WPA.

“Don’t ask me nothin’ at all. Just give me the match and oil.”

What I know—or thought I knew—about Virgin Islands calypso corresponds almost exactly^* to what I know about the Duke of Iron’s connection to the Virgin Islands, which I wrote about in passing here, years ago. (Formerly the Danish Virgin Islands, St. Croix, St. John, and St. Thomas were acquired by the United States during World War I as a hedge against the Huns. Like America’s other Caribbean colony forty miles to the west, the U.S. Virgin Islands were devastated last fall by Hurricane Maria—after being pummeled by Hurricane Irma two weeks earlier. You can contribute to the ongoing relief effort that’s being coordinated by the Community Foundation of the Virgin Islands.)

But sometimes you know more than you think you know.

When I read in today’s New York Times about Denmark’s “first public monument to a black woman,” viz. a statue of Mary Thomas, one of the “three queens” who led the workers’ uprising known as “Fireburn” in the Danish Virgin Islands in 1878, I thought:  there must be calypsos about this woman.  I was only partly wrong.

There is in fact a song, “Queen Mary”—so well known (or so I learned today) that it’s St. Croix’s unofficial anthem. And there was a stretch in the 1950s, when musicians from all over the Caribbean were eager to supply a bull market for calypso in the United States, when the tune would indeed have been called a “calypso.” But it’s really an example of what’s more properly dubbed scratch band or fungi music—or lately (and since 2003, officially) quelbe—whose sources and evolution are similar to those of calypso.  I once knew all this, vaguely, but Daniel Sheehy reminded me of it in his liner notes to a 2016 CD of that name by Stanley and the Ten Sleepless Nights, on Smithsonian Folkways records. [Edit, March 2019: the estimable Afropop Worldwide just devoted an entire episode to Quelbe.]

As soon as I served up the Smithsonian’s 30-second sample of Stanley’s rendition of “Queen Mary,” I suddenly realized that I already knew the song, and Google helped me remember from where: it also closes the album Crucian Scratch Band Music, by serious-contender-for-best-band-name-ever Blinky and the Roadmasters, which I have on a cassette somewhere in a box in the rafters of my garage.

You can learn more about the historical “Queen Mary” Thomas at a website begun by the Danish National Archives just last year.  The entry on Thomas, “The three rebel queens,” is sometimes more than a bit tone-deaf: it gratuitously comments that the rebel leader “had become somewhat intoxicated,” was “very active in vandalism,” and “had previously been punished for mistreating one of her children” (she had three, “although she was unwed”).

But at other times you can also hear it trying not to be so racist and Eurocentric—and the site itself, which has digitized thousands of documents related to the colonial administration of the Danish West Indies, part of a belated effort national reckoning—is quite remarkable.

As for the statue of Mary Thomas, which sits in front of an old sugar and rum warehouse near the prison in Copenhagen where she was jailed for her role in the rebellion: its co-sculptor, Virgin Islander La Vaughn Belle, said that “it’s about challenging Denmark’s collective memory and changing it.”  Here in the U.S., we’ve had one or two discussions recently about public statuary, including a few in my own little burg, where a bronze William McKinley, who has no connection to this place, has stood incongruously in the town square since 1906.  There’s still the small matter of Greenland, of course, but a hundred years after Denmark turned over its imperial keys to the United States, the former vendor could teach a thing or two to the buyer. Queen Mary gyal: weh yu gwan go bun?

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*With that “almost,” I’m not counting the two dozen or so tunes I’ve heard by “Calypso Craze”-era stars like Lloyd Thomas, the Mighty Zebra, and the Fabulous McClevertys.

Ivan Chermayeff

This blog has been dormant for a long time, and I can’t explain why it’s rousing itself for this story, particularly—but then again I can’t say why not, either.  The inspiration was really just one of those casual coincidences: yesterday I had occasion to speak by phone with two of the peerless staff at the Rinzler Archives of the Smithsonian Institution’s Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage. I’m writing about Lord Invader’s years in the United States and his involvement with Popular Front politics and culture, and I had some questions about unreleased material from Invader’s recording sessions for Folkways Records in the late 1950s and early ’60s. Among other things, the Rinzler houses the Moses and Frances Asch Collection, and Invader cut dozens of sides for Moe Asch between 1945 (when he came to the States to pursue a copyright claim to “Rum and Coca Cola”) and 1961, committing his final tracks to tape a few months before his untimely death.

Between them, labels run by Asch and Emory Cook, whose collection also wound up under the Rinzler’s roof, issued some of the most significant bodies of recorded calypso of the mid-twentieth century; together those labels form the core of Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, which keeps the Folkways and Cook catalogs in print (well, print-on-demand) in their entirety and occasionally mines them—and their associated archival collections—for new compilations. (In fact, John Cowley compiled an essential selection of Invader’s output for Moe Asch for the 2000 CD Calypso in New York, Smithsonian Folkways SFW 40454.)

That evening, as I belatedly leafed through the day’s newspaper before bed, I came upon Margalit Fox’s obituary for famed graphic designer Ivan Chermayeff, who created iconic logos for (among others) Chase bank, Mobil Oil, New York University, and…the Smithsonian.

In the 1950s, Chermayeff cut his teeth designing album covers for Columbia, Command, and others—but not for Cook or Folkways. No calypso albums, either, as far as I know. The universe is rarely that liberal with its coincidences.

Fidel Castro

In 1959, Lord Invader celebrated the fact that every once in a while it’s the revolutionaries, not the reactionaries, who surprise the world.

An internationalist of long standing, Invader recorded “Fidel Castro” for an album on Moe Asch‘s New York-based Folkways label (Calypso Travels, FW 8733) that also included denunciations of the segregationist governor Orval Faubus (“Crisis in Arkansas“) and the racist “Teddy Boys” then terrorizing Blacks in Great Britain (“Cat-o-Nine Tails,” a cover of the “Teddy Boy Calypso” he’d released in England earlier that year). The shorter, slicker version of “Fidel” above, however, is from a children’s record (!), Brown Boy in the Ring, made around the same time. The rowdier version from Calypso Travels can be heard in an unauthorized upload to YouTube here.

“For many in Latin America, Africa, and the rest of the Third World, Castro achieved giant-slayer status by standing up to the United States and supporting independence and social movements around the globe,” writes Peter Kornbluh in The Nation (December 19/26, 2016). In spite of his subsequent authoritarian and often repressive rule, Castro’s “vision, action, and principles of international revolutionary solidarity indisputably transformed his country from a small Caribbean nation under the thumb of US hegemony into a major independent actor on the world stage.” That—together with what historian Greg Grandin called the “joyful, raucous, and brash” nature of Castro’s revolution—is what endeared him to fellow travelers like Invader.

Post-Caribana Miscellany

As I start this, the Caribbean Carnival grand parade will be wining down Toronto’s Lake Shore Boulevard for a couple more hours yet, and the Caribana revels continue through tomorrow (Sunday, July 31), so the “post-” in this post’s title is decidedly premature. But I’ve been away for many weeks, seeing exotic sights and enjoying the company of old friends, and now I’ve returned home to stare down the end of summer and face the impending doom of a new academic year. So I’m having a hard time living in the moment.

But it’s a beautiful day in northern coastal California, and I’m furiously procrastinating the things I really ought to be doing. This seems as good a moment as any, then, to catch up on a bunch of random items I’ve been collecting. And actually, the first item is apropos: while I was on the road, Dave De Castro, The Bandit, Caribana’s first kaiso king, finally got a proper obituary—and a good one, at that—from George Haim in The Star.

Another culture-bearer passed while I was away—a true literary giant: Bajan-born Canadian writer Austin Clarke, whose early work imagined the lives of West Indian domestics (and other working-class immigrants) in 1950s Toronto with poignant humor, and whose 2002 novel The Polished Hoe justly won the Commonwealth Writers Prize. (His memoir Growing Up Stupid Under the Union Jack, a devastatingly hilarious indictment of colonial education, surely carries one of the all-time best titles in literature.) Clarke’s death was noted by The Star, The New York Times, and Pride, among others, while ArtsEtc (Barbados) reprinted a 1998 interview, “Sail On, Prince of Tides.”

Thankfully, many of the elders are still with us, and it’s good to see them going strong—and getting recognition. For instance:

With support from Torontonian Drew Gonsalves (and his band Kobo Town), five-time T&T calypso monarch Calypso Rose has just released a new album, Far From Home, that’s garnering plenty of attention. (See, e.g., this feature story in the London Guardian.)  Accompanied by Kobo Town, the Queen will close this year’s WOMEX World Music Expo in Santiago de Compostela, Spain, where she will also receive the WOMEX Award. Here’s Rose’s take on Lord Executor’s “They Say I Reign Too Long”:

And 90-year-old pianist Randy Weston, whose West Indian heritage was reflected in early recordings like “Fire Down There” (immortalized a year later as “St. Thomas” by his label-mate Sonny Rollins) and “Little Niles,” was just inducted into DownBeat magazine’s hall of fame. He’s the subject of the August issue’s cover story, and he’s getting ready to go out on tour. NPR’s Jazz Night In America caught him at the 2016 Panama Jazz Festival.

Other miscellany:

• Old calypso, exhumed and restored: Lovey’s Band, “Oh, Mr. Brown” at Excavated Shellac
• Old calypso, sampled and re-animated: Australian band The Avalanches build their new single, “Frankie Sinatra,” on Houdini’s “Bobby Sox Idol” (Thanks very much to an alert reader for this tip! But what is it with Houdini Down Under?—cf. C. W. Stoneking’s “Brave Son of America“)
• Old calypso, mashed up: “Pimped-up Calypso: Case Studies” (I’ve been meaning for ages to give a shout-out to the excellent new blog by “Lord Investor,” who is on a mission to explain “to the world what’s so good about calypso.” In a distantly related vein, see Carrie Battan’s New Yorker piece about Mixpak Records, “Rhythm Revival“)

 

The Bandit’s Last Carnival

Dave De Castro—The Bandit—passed away earlier this month.  A proud Trinidadian who began performing in Canada in the mid-1950s, Bandit was named that country’s first Calypso Monarch at the inaugural Caribana calypso competition in 1969.

He was a lovely, big-hearted man and a natural raconteur, funny, gracious, and generous with his time and his memories. He loved life and loved his family, and to the end he was fervently devoted the art of calypso. My sympathies to all his friends and loved ones.

Kaiso, Bandit!

Anniversary LXXX

This blog has been dormant for a long time. Not deliberately; it’s just—well, you know. Connect the dots. Fill in the blank.

Anyway, reading about the 50th anniversary of the legendary Vanguard Jazz Orchestra (originally the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis Orchestra, the group has held a regular Monday night gig at the Village Vanguard since February 7, 1966) got me thinking about an unkept promise from last May, when I noted that three institutions who played big roles in promoting calypso in North America were all celebrating milestone anniversaries in the same year. (I only ever got around to writing about one of the three.)

The VJO doesn’t haven’t an especially close connection to calypso, of course. Okay: there’s Jim McNeely’s “305,” named for his former street address in…Crown Heights? Flatbush?…anyway, he claimed the tune’s West Indian feel came from rhythms he’d heard in his old Brooklyn ‘hood. (He eventually recorded it with the Stockholm Jazz Orchestra.) And Bob Mintzer’s “Antigua,” a samba-flavored calypso included on the VJO’s 2002 release, Can I Persuade You:

But that’s about all I can dig up, calypso-wise, in the band’s five-decades-long songbook.

The Vanguard itself is an altogether different matter. Among Max Gordon’s most successful early bookings were the “Calypso Recorders,” a cabaret-style revue built around Gerald Clark’s Caribbean Serenaders and vocalist the Duke of Iron, with accompaniment by Bill Matons, a lefty modern dancer whose small troupe interpreted the Duke’s calypsos with pantomimed masked dramas. (Popular Front types had lately begun adopting New York-based calypsonians as fellow travelers, thereby imbuing calypso with a certain bohemian cachet: Clark, for instance, had already been tapped to provide music for The New Masses annual ball later that year, while Wilmoth Houdini had recently concluded a run at Barney Josephson’s forward-thinking Cafe Society.)

The Vanguard show—which started in late August 1939, at a moment when calypso 78s were flying off the shelves of mid-Manhattan music shops (Clark’s was the backing band on most of them; hence his insistence on being billed as the Recorders)—ran three times nightly, and it was such a hit, with enthusiastic notices in Billboard, Variety, and all the New York dailies, that at the end of ten weeks, Gordon signed Clark for another ten months. He continued to book calypso periodically all the way through the 1950s.

My lack of follow-through on this post was due in part to sheer peevishness. A year ago I spoke on the phone with what journalists would call a “high-ranking official” at the Vanguard, who told me that business records and other ephemera from the old days were scarce, but warmly offered to let me peruse the club’s booking “bible”—containing names and dates of headlining artists—and suggested, tantalizingly, that there might be other “ledgers” I could look at too. But when I followed up a few months later, in preparation for a summer visit to the city, I got the cold shoulder.

No matter. The Village Vanguard’s own website features several great pieces of calypso ephemera, including the above handbill. I’m writing about some of the reviews as part of a chapter on calypso’s embrace by the American left in the 1940s. In the meantime, here’s a photo of Matons, a/k/a The Calypso Kid (he later made a career as “Calypso Joe”), performing the pantomime to “Edward VIII” that he introduced at the Vanguard in 1939:

Bill Matons, publicity shot for an engagement at New York’s Pago Pago Club, January 1941. (New York Journal-American photo morgue, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin)

Anniversary XC

By strange coincidence, three institutions that played important parts in the spread of calypso in North America are marking big anniversaries this year—every one a good round multiple of ten: The New Yorker is 90, the Village Vanguard 80, and Radio Canada International 70. I hope to post about all three before the year is out, and today I start with the eldest.

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For calypso researchers, The New Yorker is famous for one thing: “Houdini’s Picnic,” a profile of Wilmoth Houdini, the self-crowned king of New York calypsonians, that appeared in the issue of May 6, 1939. Its author, the legendary Joseph Mitchell, had recently joined The New Yorker as a staff writer after a star turn at the World-Telegram; “Houdini’s Picnic” was one of his earliest pieces for the smart-set weekly.  It’s a classic of its type: part character sketch, part urban chronicle—a type that, as it happens, Mitchell practically invented. “He was drawn to people on the margins,” comments Charles McGrath, reviewing a new biography of Mitchell: “bearded ladies, Gypsies, street preachers, Bowery bums, Mohawk steelworkers, the fishmongers at the Fulton Market.” But his tone is mostly curious and sympathetic. A “great noticer” and a “careful listener” with a superb ear for dialogue, Mitchell was a sociologist at heart, “genuinely interested in his subjects as human beings, remarkable because they so vividly demonstrate that one way or another we are all a little weird.” There is “no kitsch in his portraits,” adds current New Yorker editor David Remnick, introducing Up in the Old Hotel, the definitive collection of Mitchell’s writing for the magazine. By contrast, the Journal-American‘s H. Allen Smith, like many of Mitchell’s rivals and imitators, saw people “as ‘characters,’ and mined them for their colorfulness” (McGrath again). Smith’s portrait of Houdini, “Hot Dogs Made Their Name,” which appeared a year later (and was collected in Low Man on a Totem Pole), is arch and condescending. Where Mitchell is deadpan, Smith is jokey. Mitchell’s Houdini is rough-edged and well-spoken. Smith’s is a buffoon.

Joseph Mitchell wasn’t the only one of Harold Ross’s staff writers to cast an interested eye upon New York’s West Indian community.  As early as 1928, “The Talk of the Town” took an excursion to Van Cortland Park in Riverdale—er, the Bronx—to look in on the “group of West Indian Negroes” who congregated there on Sunday afternoons to play “an unusually beautiful game of cricket” (and speak an equally “beautiful brand of English”).  (J.M. Flagler would return in 1954 to write a long profile of West Indian cricketers in New York, “Well Caught, Mr. Holder“; Edith M. Agar and Brendan Dealy checked in once more in 1988.)  In the course of keeping up with “Exotic Harlem,” meanwhile, Pauline Emmet in 1930 schooled herself on West Indian-American cuisine: “The West Indian Negro…will scarcely look at a chicken,” she pronounced. “What he likes are yams, yucas, papayas, and things like that.”

And music? As I mentioned last month, it’s a safe bet that the Renaissance Ballroom’s house band, led by Vernon Andrade, wasn’t only supplying swing tunes for the 5000 masquerading Lindy Hoppers and Suzy-Q’ers at the West Indian “Coronation Ball” that Earl Brown visited in 1937. By December 1938 the magazine’s anonymous popular record reviewer, always abreast of emerging trends, was recommending “selected West Indian discs” as a last-minute Christmas gift for “friends who will be diverted by the curious rhythmic outbreaks in dialect from the Calypso singers.”  He began with a representative five, but as Decca had already issued “almost a hundred of these native naïvetés,” some of which seemed “shrewdly manufactured for the tourist trade,” he referred “Calypso collectors”—they were a thing—to midtown’s Liberty Music Shop for “[e]xpert first aid.”  By the following year, Steinway & Sons Record Shop, also in midtown, was advertising its own recommendations…

Ad for Steinway & Sons Record Shop, New Yorker 2 December 1939

…and Houdini was back on the radar of the magazine’s unnamed reviewer, who led off his December 30th column with a notice for the album advertised above, Houdini’s—and calypso’s—first. (Heretofore, he explained, “Calypso songs, by which the natives of Trinidad comment informally on whatever events of the moment strike their fancy…have been casually released on single discs.” But they have “caught on so successfully during the brief time they’ve been available in this country that now Decca has come out with a three-record set.”)

When calypso began to be featured at Cafe Society and the Village Vanguard in the summer of 1939, it naturally showed up in “Goings On About Town,” and eventually the Vanguard even took out small ads:

The New Yorker 11 May 1940

In 1941, Robert A. Simon was amused by the calypso that Belle Rosette (Beryl McBurnie), who had debuted at the Vanguard in December 1940, sang at one of Louise Crane’s high-concept “Coffee Concerts” at MOMA—a “South American Panorama” that also featured Elsie Houston, the Grupo Incaico, and a Haitian “Rada” group.  (“Some of the visitors may have expected terribly primitive revelations,” quipped Simon, “but the event was no more aboriginal than a good floor show.”) Belle Rosette’s offering “began with international topicality and ended with something about Bach and Toscanini discussing Calypso music.” If that report seems a tad flip, then Simon at least conceded, after a lame attempt of his own, that “manufacturing Calypso lyrics isn’t so simple as one might expect.”

Houdini’s swan song for The New Yorker was in 1944, when he made an uncredited cameo in an ad for Bell Telephone, which had begun overseas long distance service to Trinidad earlier that year (and nicked the image in the lower lefthand corner from the cover of Houdini’s above-mentioned album for Decca). Note the nod to the “Good Neighbor” policy.

New Yorker, 14 October 1944

The last New Yorker writer to engage with New York’s West Indians in a spirit akin to Mitchell’s was J.M. Flagler, who twice in the mid-50s called upon cricketer, Con Ed clerk, and amateur composer Joseph Willoughby as his native informant: once to comment on the West Indian Day Parade, then held on 7th Avenue in Harlem, and again to weigh in on the 1957 Calypso Craze. On the latter occasion Willoughby, who with his partner, Harlem M.D. Walter Merrick, wrote “Run, Joe,” a 1947 hit for Louis Jordan, was equivocal: “On the one hand, I stand to profit personally,” he conceded, as his songwriting services were once again in demand and three recordings of his older calypsos had been reissued. “On the other hand, I fear that the cause of calypso is not being well served artistically.” Make that cricketer, clerk, composer…and diplomat.

In more recent years, the keen and versatile Hilton Als, who joined The New Yorker in 1994, and who, in the words of Coco Fusco, was reared in Brooklyn “by uppity Caribbean matriarchs,” can be counted on periodically to shed light on things West Indian and West Indian-American (“Notes on My Mother,” excerpted from his memoir, The Women, is an early example)—although it was Ian Frazier who wrote on the Brooklyn Labor Day j’ouvert parade back in 2010.

Kadir Nelson’s cover—one of nine—for the 90th Anniversary issue of the New Yorker (via the It’s Nice That blog). Any chance Eustace has some classic calypso loaded on that smartphone?

 

 

Hello Americans: Orson Welles and Calypso, Pan-American Style

May 6th marks the Orson Welles centenary, and NPR had a story this past Sunday on the famous film director’s work for radio. Everyone knows about Welles’s notorious radio drama of The War of the Worlds; fewer remember that it was an episode of The Mercury Theatre on the Air (see also the Digital Deli and Kim Scarborough’s tribute site), a weekly series for which Welles and his regular company of stage talents—John Houseman, Agnes Moorehead, Ray Collins, et al.—adapted scores of literary works.

More obscure still: Hello Americans, Welles’s short-lived CBS radio series that plumped for FDR’s “Good Neighbor” policy, combating U.S. provincialism and fostering cross-cultural understanding. That was the theory, anyway. Underwritten by Nelson Rockefeller’s Office of Inter-American Affairs, the series ran for a mere twelve weeks in late 1942 and early 1943 before it was cancelled. (Typically, Welles was…let’s say “stretched too thin” to supervise it properly.)

Orson Welles in Rio, 1942

These days, your average grad student in the humanities could pick all sorts of ideological holes in Hello Americans. But that’s no reason to doubt Welles’s good faith. A vocal anti-racist and a supporter of African-American writers, actors and artists, the wunderkind was hailed in the Black press as a “friend of the Negro.”  And even if the cynics contend that “Good Neighbor” was finally just a warm and fuzzy cover for an earlier Roosevelt’s Big Stick (or worse, the foundation for an imminent American imperium), nevertheless the New Deal internationalism that Welles peddled—sincerely—was essentially a Popular Front knockoff. Progressives of all stripes believed that the war against fascism must lead to the end of colonialism abroad and Jim Crow at home and to a radical realignment in the relations of power between the nations of North and South. “Good Neighbor”—a “shift in representation towards a more lateral and dialogic notion of adjacency, positioning U.S. and Latin American culture on the same plane,” as Tom McEnaney puts it in a brilliant reading of Hello Americans—was a hemispheric head start on “One World.”

By 1942 you didn’t need to be Melville Herskovitz or Katherine Dunham to see African retentions forming the backbone of Pan-American culture, especially in the realms of music and dance. Plenty of people—artists, especially—were fascinated by what linked rumba and samba, calypso and “voodoo,” with spirituals, jazz, and blues. A year earlier, even Ed Sullivan, then an influential entertainment columnist for the New York Daily News, had taken his syndicated “Little Old New York” on a Pan-American junket, temporarily renaming it “Little Old New York In South America,” to find out for himself.

Calypsonians had been celebrating their own spanning of the hemisphere for some time already (see Lord Caresser’s “My Luxurious Life” and “Exploiting,” for example, or Lion and Atilla’s “Guests of Rudy Vallee“), and both Sullivan’s and Welles’s tours of the Americas included literal or figurative stops in Trinidad. Welles’s radio series visited twice, in fact, and on both occasions he was “met” by Lancelot Pinard, known professionally as Sir Lancelot.

Pinard’s résumé as a calypsonian wasn’t long, however. He came from a privileged background in Trinidad and was sent to New York to pursue medicine. But Pinard quit his studies after bandleader Gerald Clark heard him sing at a private party (he’d had classical vocal training) and invited Pinard to join his calypso revue at the Village Vanguard. At the same time, Pinard recorded two sides with Clark for Varsity, one of which, “G-Man Hoover,” became a novelty hit. When the Vanguard gig ended (wildly popular, it was extended for ten months), Pinard went on a nationwide tour and wound up in Hollywood. That location, along with his refined elocution, gave him some singular advantages in the U.S. market. When he appeared on Hello Americans, he was awaiting the release of his (and calypso’s) screen debut, the Mary Martin-Dick Powell comedy Happy Go Lucky.

Afro-American, 17 October 1942

Pinard was also a genteel radical. A member of the leftwing music collective People’s Songs, he recorded for Eric Bernay’s Keynote label (home of the Almanac Singers), famously set Henry Wallace’s “Century of the Common Man” speech to music, and campaigned for Wallace in 1948. In a 1941 profile by Ollie Stewart for the Afro-American, Pinard agreed that “there is a definite kinship between…the calypso of Trinidad, the tango of the Argentine, the rhumba of Cuba, the samba and conga of Brazil and jazz of the United States”—all of them rooted in the “rhythms of Africa…all contributed to their respective countries by ex-slave groups.”  “However,” Pinard continued,

calypsos have one distinction that sets them apart from other folk music, particularly that contributed by the American colored man. The white man has not (yet) muscled in and commercialized calypsos, to the exclusion of its originators, as he has done with American dance music and folk tunes. Trinidadians have refused to teach the calypso technique to white musicians.

That would change, soon enough. In the meantime, Sir Lancelot might demonstrate calypso for the ofay prince of Hollywood (“Ofays Slow to Grasp,” read the final subhead of Stewart’s piece), but no matter how sympathetic his politics, he wouldn’t show the Pan-American mediator, ventriloquist, and potential appropriator how to do it.

His first offering (from “The Alphabet: C to S,” 13 December 1942) starts out as an anodyne tourist-board ad, then transforms into a manifesto of Pan-American solidarity against fascist “men of tyranny” (move the slider to 2:18):

Next time, with Mexican singer Tito Guízar filling in for an indisposed Welles (“Ritmos de las Americas,” 3 January 1943), Lancelot called the “Sons of America” to arms to avenge the attack on Pearl Harbor and fight for “the right to live in dignity, justice, and liberty” (move the slider to 5:40):

Lancelot would make his own tour of South America in 1946, by the way, and he would come home with a few interesting things to say. (He also offered a musical take on Pan-Americanism.)

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Further reading:

• Hello Americans (Wikipedia)
• Hello Americans: all twelve episodes at The Internet Archive, source of the above streams
• “Life Goes to Rio Party: Orson Welles frolics at Famous Mardi Gras” (Life 18 May 1942)
• Joao Perdigao, “Citizen Samba“
• Tom McEnaney, “Hello, Americans: Orson Welles, Latin America, and the Sounds of the ‘Good Neighbor'” (Sound Studies August 2013)
• And, of course, the second volume of Simon Callow’s biography of Welles, also entitled Hello Americans