In May 2024, a jukebox musical about the life of pioneering female calypso singer Calypso Rose premiered in Trinidad and Tobago. Queen of the Road: The Story of Calypso Rose The book details her life and development through the medium of more than 40 calypso songs, and is critical of the misogyny of rival calypso singers and the male-dominated society that excluded many women from the calypso world.
Calypso Rose was a warrior. She broke rules, subverted stereotypes and paved the way for future women on stage and on record. She paved the way for countless female calypsonians and soca artists. But first, a little history.
Today’s female calypsonists and soca artists are the descendants of a long lineage of women who began their singing and carnival careers at the other end of society – the lower classes. diameter (The French word from which the patois word “jamette” comes) is derived).
Late 19th century Trinidad Carnival was dominated by an underworld of jamettes: singers, drummers, dancers, stick fighters (both male and female), prostitutes and pimps. The roster of participants includes a unique cast of characters with memorable names, such as Bodhisia, Alice Sugar and her sister Petty Bell Lily, Cariso Jane, Mossy Millie, Ocean Lizzie, Sybil Steele, Lynn Mama, Darling Dan, Hard Buck Doris, Baje, Annie Coles and Myrtle the Turtle.
These women were early Kaysos (The West African music from which calypso originated, and which is sometimes used synonymously with calypso.) Their names appear in the lyrics. For example, the famous white singer Cedric Le Blanc said, Chantwell (Reminiscence singer) — reported to have sung in 1873:
Everyone knows Diamet’s body shears
It’s a real shame for us Carisos.
I really don’t understand
Why didn’t she get training from the British?
Women’s influence and power in a male-dominated society played a crucial role in the development of calypso. Between 1882 and 1884, regulations and ordinances were put into place that banned carnival activities, effectively driving men underground and stifling women’s activities. Kalinda (Staff fighting) song.
Women continued to be more direct, even militant, and to oppose legal restrictions. They continued to sing. Calisos — Obscene songs (part of the evolution of calypso) were also full of humor. Picon (Provocative joke).
In 1883, a Trinidadian newspaper described the obscene song as “an imitation of the obscene song of Curaçao, first brought from that island and sung here by a woman named Bimbim and her equally indecent daughters, who each night, to the peculiar music of the kerubai (song and dance), performed the most lewd acts, symbolizing the sensual vocation to which they had devoted themselves.”
these Chanterelles (Female Chantwell) became the foundation for the development of female calypsonians and modern female soca artists. Scholars and researchers have advocated and defended the theory that these code restrictions indicate that male singers followed suit and eventually adopted a less gladiatorial version of female carÃso as the new standard.
A kind of anodyne calypso evolved in the 20th century, when men took the helm, and it became virtually Double meaning (Double meaning) and humour is more important than aggression, and wordsmiths are more important than soldiers.It is no exaggeration to say that without women there would be no modern calypso, and without modern calypso there would be no soca.
TThe idea of ​​women being sung, rather than women singing, took hold in the male-dominated world of calypso in the 20th century. Iconic calypso singer Atilla the Hun recorded the calypso “De Liso” in 1938, which contains the following stanza:
At that time, women sang calypso.
Like Sophie Matalony and Marivon
I was walking around with a boule d’affe
That is, during the time of Cambouley.
(*A kerosene bottle with a burning cloth inside, similar to a Molotov cocktail)
That name, Sophie Matalony, reappears in newspaper articles from the time as the singer of the Guadeloupean song “Estmac li Bas”, also known as “Pauline”, considered by some experts to be the most popular song of the 1908 Carnival and similar to a modern road march, the first time it was sung by a woman.
History records her as a “jamet bullfighter,” or, as the press has repeatedly referred to her, “a woman famous in the jamet world for ‘disturbing the peace.'”
Despite Materony’s pioneering achievements, the colonial Victorian social environment, with its misogyny, jealousy, perverse obsession with servile relations and intimacy in return, and the restriction of island women to domestic roles (not calypso tents), generally stifled women’s careers, and women’s achievements in the arts of the first half of the 20th century were only unearthed by researchers and journalists many years later.
For example, in 1914, some unknown women participated in a chorus singing the first calypsos and original Kalinda songs recorded in English with Julian Whiterose. Significantly, several women became outcasts, or more accurately, pioneers.
In a male-dominated society, female influence and power played a crucial role in the evolution of calypso.
Lady Trinidad (Thelma Lane) was the first woman to perform as a featured singer in a tent in 1935 and the first woman to record a calypso in 1937. She, and the world, missed out on the first female calypsonian, as rival calypsonists Roaring Lion and Atilla the Hun allegedly suggested to businessman Eduardo Sa Gomez that Lady Trinidad was too attractive to visit the United States to record and perform on radio without being married off to a foreign man.
Her pioneering efforts led to small steps, and in 1936 two more women entered the tent scene: Lady Baldwin (Mavis Baldwin) and Lady MacDonald (Doris MacDonald). Lady Ire (Maureen St. John), first with her husband Lord Ire and later alone, continued the slow progress of female solo calypsonians over the next two decades, but the number of recordings by women in the next two decades is in doubt, as master recordings were destroyed by Decca and others.
It wasn’t until the mid-to-late 1950s, when Calypso Rose (Linda McArtha Sandy Lewis) entered the calypso world along with Singing Francine (Francine Edwards), that women’s participation in the live and recording sectors of the industry gradually increased.
In the nearly three decades between Rose’s arrival and her victory in the 1978 Calypso King contest (rebranded as the gender-neutral Calypso Monarch) and the Road March crown (for the second year in a row), making her the first woman to hold both crowns, there were more women in the tent, but sadly their numbers remained small.
Rose was meant to inspire a new generation by writing and performing her own songs, but calypso music, written by men and sung by women, was still the norm.
In the 21st century, Trinidadian society has changed. Machoism has reluctantly retreated in favor of pragmatism, and when women step forward, everyone goes along with it. There is less praise, but it seems less unusual. This is a sign of hope.
Singing Sandra (Sandra DeVingne-Millington) was the second woman to win the Calypso Monarch, in 1999 and 2003, and the first woman to win it a second time (a woman to win it twice). Her win, along with Denise Plummer (who won in 2001), marked a slight improvement at the turn of the new century. Karine Ash (2011) and Teri Lyons (2020) have also won the Calypso Monarch. Nearly a decade had passed between their last three wins.
debtThat five women have won the calypso contest over more than a century repeats a pattern of indifference in the calypso tent, but not at the Road March: Sanelle Dempster won the Road March in 1999 (only the second woman to do so), followed by Faye Ann Lyons who won three times between 2003 and 2009, Patrice Roberts winning Duet in 2006, and then in 2010 the country’s first female Prime Minister was elected.
The 50 years since soca became the de facto music of not only Trinidad’s carnival but the Caribbean’s carnivals have seen notable changes in both participants and performances. Destra Garcia, Faye-Anne Lyons, Nadia Batson and Alison Hinds of Barbados have been stars of soca for decades, along with more recent superstars Patrice Roberts and Nyra Blackman (all of whom Caribbean Beat, Includes cover stories on Batson, Hines and Calypso Rose.
It is no exaggeration to say that without women there would be no modern calypso, and without modern calypso there would be no soca.
They wrote their own songs and performances, and in a sense recaptured the attitude of the Jamette Carnival of the late 1800s: owning their bodies and their desires without relying on “mansplaining” experts to preach prudence, rebelling against a class that sought to censor their dance moves and normalize what was considered provocative.The objectification of women in song continued, but some female singers were redefining it on their own terms, on records and on stage.
In 2004, calypso scholar Rudolph Ottley and his team founded the Diva Cabaret to bring uncensored female vocals to Trinidad Carnival, with the aim of providing an all-female alternative to the dwindling number of modern calypso tents, and to address the still woefully under-represented representation of female calypsos in existing tents.
Twenty years later, a man named Machel Montano became the cabaret’s “star performer,” ironically mirroring Madame Trinidad’s position in 1935.
As Trinidadian society has evolved and most of the masqueraders and steel pan players are female, it is inevitable that female participation in calypso has followed an upward trend, making up almost 50% of contemporary tent performers.
Despite early prohibitions, women played a major role in the development of calypso style and performance, and in restoring the once-dominant Creole dance and performance aesthetic to the art form. Women’s representation in calypso is not a passing fad, but an enduring and successful reality.
