THE HISTORY OF "CALYPSO"

The history of the calypso is that of urbanisation, immigration and Black reconstruction in post-Emancipation Trinidad. Some commentators have seen the Calypsoes deriving from an older West African tradition of social commentary, in which praise, blame or derision were conveyed in song or folk tales. This suggests that one possible approach to writing a history of the Calypso in Trinidad would be to identify its West African roots and then to trace what happened to that oral tradition In colonial Trinidad, where there was a phenomenal mixture of peoples, languages and customs.

One would next have to be aware of the situation of West African music and narrative traditions in the French West Indian islands which, because of the Haitian Revolution, became the source of the influx of French planters and their enslaved African work force into Hispanic Trinidad during the late eighteenth century. One would then have to determine how the struggle of British colonizers to anglicize Franco-Spanish Trinidad affected the broad and ever-changing masses of the people at the base of the society.

How did the people respond to the pressures of Church, State, and the privileged proprietorial classes: attempts to ban, then control the Carnival, Iaws against the drum and the playing of various musical instruments, pressure against the tamboo-bamboo calinda bands in the early years of the twentieth cerntury, and laws against Shango (Orisha worship), Bongo and the Spiritual Baptist religion? Such questions are important because they involve the whole process of cultural erosion, adaptation. change and innovation, as well as the concern today with national identity.

All of these elements have occurred in the Trinidad Calypso and in folksongs throughout the Caribbean. African music often served the purpose of social control and the roots of the political calypsonian in Trinidad probably lie in the African custom of permitting criticism of one's leaders at specific times in particular contexts, and through the media of song and story. The leaders of society recognized the value of such satircial songs in which the ordinary person given the privilege of unburdening his mind with the impact of his protest was neutralized by the controlled context within which criticism was permissible.

Dances among the enslaved generally took place on Saturdays and Sundays when, in spite of laws whlch stipulated a 9.00 p.m. ending, they frequently extended long into the night. Slave dances were viewed by the planters with mixture of suspicion and tolerance. The connection between song and dance assemblies and rebellion, was early acknowledged in the French Antilles, and in Martinlque in 1654, an Ordinance was passed prohibiting such assemblies. Since the dances occurred on Sundays they came under frequent attack from the Church throughout the British and the French colonies, both in America and the West Indies. Sunday dances were considered to be sacrilegious and contrary to the pure motions of the spirit of Christianity.

One of the Church's weapons - was excommunication. This policy was quite effective in one sense: it created a division in the minds of many people between the sacred and the secular, between the Lord's songs and the Devil's music. Yet the Black people's dances and their accompanying songs both persisted. the "deshonnetes", "lascives" and "indecentes" pelvic movements of la calinda, happily outliving Pere Labat's recommendations that slaves be taught the minuet and the courante as useful and acceptable correctives.

In Trinidad, the Calypso emerged out of this complex of song and dance, social conflict and censorship which had pervaded the colonies from their inception. It is related to all Black dlaspora musics, regardless of language, and shares with them traditional African functions of affirmation, celebration, protest, satire, praise, blame and conflict of all varieties; and it has faced similar strictures throughout the years of its survival.