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.

The Real Sam Charters

The New York Times rightly eulogized Samuel Charters this week as a “foundational scholar of the blues.” Other obituaries emphasized his “discovery” of Bahamian guitar wizard Joseph Spence in 1958. But enthusiasts of Golden Age calypso will remember Charters as the compiler and annotater of The Real Calypso: 1927-1946 and The Real Calypso, Vol. 2 (variously subtitled Send Your Children to the Orphan Home and Out the Fire: Calypso Songs of Social Commentary and Love Troubles), which rescued forgotten classics like Caresser’s “Edward the VIII” and Tiger’s “Money Is King” from oblivion and paved the way for a golden age of calypso reissues. (Rounder’s collections of the 1990s and Bear Family’s magisterial West Indian Rhythm [2006] all have Samuel Charters in their DNA. And maybe the Charters lineage hasn’t run out: it’s rumored that another big box gathering the rest of the prewar Decca and ARC sides is in the works. Yes please!)

The author and ethnomusicologist was a lifelong devotee of music from across the black diaspora, so he came by his interest in calypso honestly. (In fact, I’ve read that Charters happened upon Spence when, as a song collector and field recorder for Moe Asch‘s Folkways Records, he was traveling the Caribbean in search of local musical styles “uncorrupted” by the influence of Trinidadian calypso.) But he wasn’t necessarily a scholar—or even a discographer—of calypso. The bulk of his “annotations” on Volume 1 consists of a multi-paragraph quote from J.D. Elder‘s calypso primer for Sing Out! magazine, and when Charters flew solo on Volume 2, it was clear that his own expertise didn’t match his, uh, elder’s. (On basic points of information, moreover, he was factually incorrect: the majority of tunes on the album were not recorded in Trinidad, for instance, but in New York.) Still, the strength of both discs is in their selection, not their documentation.

In his biography of Asch, Making People’s Music, Peter Goldsmith noted that “[l]ike Harry Smith’s Anthology [of American Folk Music] and Fred Ramsey’s History of Jazz series” (Ramsey, whom Charters knew, was another calypso fan and annotater, by the way), The Country Blues and many subsequent records on Charters’s Folkways subsidiary label RBF—Records, Books and Film, including both volumes of The Real Calypso, “consisted of reissued recordings from the twenties and thirties, usually appropriated without any arrangements with the original labels. . . . Charters made the dubious claim that ‘the American copyright laws permit the reissue of any of these older performances, the only restriction being that the name of the company not be used in any notes or advertising'” (269).

In the case of calypso, at least, I’m glad he made that claim. For one thing, the aptly named Universal, heir/engulfer/devourer of the Decca label, has more than enough money already, even in the twilight of the record industry. Besides, Decca paid the calypso singers and musicians peanuts to begin with, as “artists-for-hire.” And none of the succession of Decca’s corporate foster parents over the past half-century has ever been what you could call a steward of this important cultural patrimony. Plus, Capitalism Is (still) Killing Music, not to mention scholarship. So there. Anyway, let’s call what Samuel Charters did “liberation,” not appropriation. Whatever it was, it wasn’t dubious: his lifelong work for black music history was as real as it gets.

More on Sam Charters:

• The Samuel and Ann Charters Archives of Blues and African American Vernacular Music Culture (Dodd Center, UConn)
  • Sam Charters: Singing the Blues at UConn (YouTube)
• A Language of Song: Journeys in the Musical World of the African Diaspora (Duke UP, 2009): Charters’s final book, with chapters on calypso and pan
• Tribute to Sam Charters at Smithsonian Folkways