The Mighty Sparrow
THE MIGHTY SPARROW
Nationality: Trinidadian. Born: Grandroy Bay, Grenada, 9 July 1935; moved to Trinidad in 1938. Family: Married Margaret Skinner, two daughters and two sons. Career: Calypso singer/performer: first public Carnival appearance in 1956; many international tours. Awards: Trinidad Carnival Calypso King Crown, 1956, 1960, 1962, 1963, 1972, 1973, 1974, and Road March Crown, 1956, 1958, 1960, 1961, 1966, 1969, 1972, 1984; Hummingbird Medal (Trinidad); The Chaconia Gold (Trinidad and Tobago). D.Litt.: University of the West Indies, Kingston, Jamaica.
Publications
Poetry
One Hundred and Twenty Calypsoes to Remember. Port of Spain, n.p., 1963.
Sparrow: The Legend: Calypso King of the World. Port of Spain, Inprint, 1986(?).
Recordings: more than 60 albums, and many singles.
*Critical Studies: "Sparrow and the Language of the Calypso" by Gordon Rohlehr, in Caribbean Quarterly (Mona, Kingston), 14(1–2), March-June 1968; The Future in the Present—Selected Writings by CLR James. Westport, Connecticut, L. Hill, and London, Allison & Busby, 1977.
* * *That the subject of this essay, along with the other practitioners of the tradition from which he comes, was not given an entry in Contemporary Poets until the fifth edition is indicative of the conservative tendency to define the poet, even in modern times, as an artist, separate from the traditions of the culture. Compounding this conservative stance is the fact the Caribbean and colonial literatures generally arrived on the scene apparently in full bloom as texts (mainly in the period after 1945), without that classical development from, say, the Homeric or Ljala or Vedic oral traditions that only much later appeared in written form. Without a classical tradition for his base, this category of poet suffers the lingering assumption of being somehow of a different, and lesser, breed. Yet these troubadours, griots, and calypsonians include all the elements we customarily associate with poetry: an idea growing into montage, rhythm, metrics, tone, metaphorical life supported by a wide range of language resources, sound and/or sight patterns, allusions to and from the culture of the audience.
Such is the poetry of The Mighty Sparrow, who revolutionized calypso (kaiso) singing in 1956 when he sang "Jean and Dinah" at the Trinidad carnival. Since then he has occupied the throne as ruler of a "kingdom" that represents one of the most fecund of the popular/ traditional musical forms of Trinidad and the rest of the Caribbean. The art, vitality, and cultural vehemence of this artist is an example of the old (and also very modern alternative) oral tradition within the English-language poetry of the Caribbean.
"Jean and Dinah" concerns the presence of American forces, who established strategic military, naval, and air bases in Trinidad during World War II. Their money and technical know-how acted as a (contradictory) catalyst in what was until then a fairly slow-moving Caribbean society. In "Jean and Dinah" Sparrow's satirical concern is with the demimonde of pimps, prostitutes, "wahbeens," "glad girls," "saga," and "glamour boys" who were involved in certain aspects of the U.S. servicemen's sociosexual entertainment. The song is set at a time when the Yankees were "de-escalating" their presence after dispute with the Trinidadian government over continued occupation of some of the island's land space, with the girls feeling the pinch as the main source of their pay packets dried up. Sparrow, taking on the persona of the local boys who had been neglected by these "jamettes" during the period of the American "occupation," now sings his plessure: "Trouble in town when the price drop down / Yankees gone, Sparrow tek over now." "Jean and Dinah" consists (in the 1963 printed version) of four eight-line stanzas rhyming in the traditional kaiso couplets, aabbccdd, with a six-line chorus much more adventitiously structured, abbcc and a half-rhymed d, and a rhymed caesura: "Don't make no row. Sparrow tek over now." There is also slang ("they park up in town") and nation-language ("make style"), with a biblical touch in the last line:
Is the glamour boys again
We are going to rule Port of Spain
No more Yankees to spoil the fete
Dorothy have to take what she get
All of them who use to make style
Taking their two shillin with a smile
No more Hotel and Simmonds bed
By the sweat of thy brow thou shall eat bread
The cross-rhythms, tone, performance body language, mimesis, and other forms employed by calypsonians cannot, of course, be conveyed in the written text.
"Mango Vert," from the same occupation period, is an example of one of the chief characteristics of the kaiso, the sexual double entendre:
A Yankee man an a woman was in confusion
A Yankee man an a woman was in confusion
The woman give him something to eat
With stringy stringy hair but it tasting sweet
He say a rather do without
It go stick up in me teet a done wash me mout
She said if you eat it right the hair won't stick in you mout
An you bound to say how it tasting sweet sweet sweet
But if you eat it wrong don't walk in the street
Everybody go know when they see the hair in you teet …
The song, however, ends somewhat anticlimactically because of the rather clumsy effort, in good vaudeville style, to "disappoint" the audience with a "clean" end:
A knock on the door very boldly
When a burst the door an a enter
A see them stand in up in the centre
The stupid Yankee catchin cold feet
Is a mango vert the man fraid to eat
From early in his career Sparrow became a supporter—though a very critical and sometimes quite hostile one—of the nationalist government of Trinidad and Tobago under Eric Williams. Williams became the first prime minister of independent Trinidad and Tobago in 1962 on a wave of idealism, and he instigated a number of reforms, such as a new tax system and better pay for the police in an effort to stamp out bribery and corruption. In "Police Get More Pay" Sparrow uses several formal kaiso devices, including first-line (verse) repetitions ("mad, mad, mad," "cheap, cheap, cheap, cheap"), increased complexity of the song's chorus, the alternation of long and short lines, an increased caesura rhyming, and the use of acceleration through (in the chorus) the first and third lines, capped each time by a short line:
They use to get a shilling here collect a shilling there
But all a dat stop
If they only say they broke people say they
makin joke
They pay gone up...
But it was with "Dan Is the Man in the Van," Sparrow's exposé of the fundamental irrelevance, escapism, and fantasy of colonial education, that most certainly established him as a local artist making the transition from parochial limitations to wider subject matter. The title comes from one of the Royal Readers, British textbooks that for many West Indian schoolchildren were practically the only books they had access to. Memorable lines from the text like "Dan is the man in the van" are often illustrated in the song by non-Caribbean scenes such as "Dan-is-the-English-Man-in-what-looks-like-an-English-milk-Van." A "single-tone" (four-line) kaiso makes up the body of the text, alternating with a changing "double-tone" (eight-line) chorus that breaks up the fixed meter and allows room for improvisational intervention with, throughout the poem, caesuras of varying placement:
Ac . cording to the education you get when you small
You'll grow up with true ambition and respect from
one and all
But in my days in school . they teach me like a fool
The things they teach me I should be a block-headed mule
Pussy has finish his work long ago
An now he restin and ting
Solomon Agundy was born on a Mondee
The Ass in the Lion Skin
Winkin, Blinkin and Nod
Sail off in a wooden shoe
How Agouti lose e tail and Alligator trying to get monkey
liver soup
Dan is the man in the van …
Sparrow extends his satire to nursery rhymes and snippets from some of the pictured fables included in the Royal Readers. But his punch line and the message he communicated so brilliantly to the anglophone Caribbean on the eve of political independence was that imperial education was really a plot to keep Caliban down and that his (Sparrow's) native creativity came not from Prospero's books but from his own oral folk tradition: "If me head was bright I woulda be a damn fool …"
In "Ten to One Is Murder," certainly one of Sparrow's finest achievements, he returned to the folk/slave kalinda (a stick-fighting call-and-response song form). The form provided him with the perfect dramatic format through which to recount an incident (possibly true) in which he was attacked by a street gang on the pretext that he had "interfered" with one of their women and in which he was apparently forced to use his gun ("me wedger") in self-defense. The poem begins with the raconteur using caesura rhymed triolets followed by a "break-out" chorus and orchestra that is used as an insistent chant after each new line of disclosure; the syllabics increase in intensity until the work reaches double time in the heat of the battle, ending in a mimesis of violence. But the most remarkable feature of this kalinda, possible only in the flexible oral tradition, is Sparrow's rhyme scheme, based almost entirely on the letter r:
Well they playin bad
They have me feelin bad
Well they playin beast
Why they run for Police
Ten to one is murder!
Ten criminals attack me outside a Miramar
Ten to one is murder!
About ten in de night on the fifth of October
Ten to one is murder!
Way down Henry Street up by HGM Walker
Ten to one is murder!
The leader of the gang was a hot like a pepper
Ten to one is murder!
An every man in the gang had a white handle razor
Ten to one is murder!
They say a push the girl from Grenada
Ten to one is murder!
You could imagine my position, not a police in the area
Ten to one is murder!...
By the mid-1960s Sparrow's art had entered its classical phase, his characteristic artistic devices and verse forms already established in his first ten years as a performer. What we have witnessed since then is his continuing quotidian engagement with what turns out to be an increasingly imploding postcolonial society. We find Sparrow slimming, as he says, not slowing down: rearranging as necessary or requested some of the old classics; ignoring perhaps as a bad job the involuted politics of his beloved country; and growing more philosophical in the role as an adviser and statesman to younger lovers and calypsonians.
—Edward Kamau Brathwaite