Donald R. Hill

Professor of Anthropology and

Chair, Africana/Latino Studies

State University of New York at Oneonta

© Donald R. Hill

Unpublished Draft; not for direct quotation. Copyrighted by Donald R. Hill

Introduction.

Calypso and the blues are two of the scores of musical styles that developed in the late 1800s and early 1900s in plantation America – the southern United States, the Caribbean, and the lowland Atlantic regions of South America. Each style modified diverse musical patrimonies into the expressions of poor, dispossessed people of mostly African descent in multicultural settings that were controlled by people of mostly European descent. In this paper I will compare calypso and the blues from the point of view of an anthropologist who has conducted field work in small places in the Caribbean but who has never lost his love of the blues and the summers spent in the late 1950s and early 1960s combing the rural south for blues singers. This is not a broad comparison of all types of calypso with all types of blues but only a comparison of a narrow subset of each genre. I will compare the development of the blues starting in post-reconstruction Mississippi Delta with the development of calypso beginning in late nineteenth century colonial Trinidad. At times calypso and the blues overlapped, as when southern blacks commingled with Trinidadians in New York in the 1920s. But this study does not focus on the occasional merged styles but rat her on the general cultural environments of Trinidad and the Mississippi Delta and how those environments contributed to the development of the two styles.

Classic anthropological methodology centers on the concept of culture as learned, adaptive behavior. Everything we do has a cultural component: the language we speak, the way we walk, the ideas we think, and whether or not we grow up with the blues or calypso. This technique of imbedding musical genres in entire social systems is inherently ho listic. By holistic I mean that the anthropologist looks at the large picture and paints theories and hypotheses with wide strokes.

The cultural "whole" may be considered a system of interrelated parts, with each affecting the other. One could say that the economic subsystem, the social subsystem, the political subsystem and the religious subsystem are the parts, with the economic subsystem at the base, although this breakdown of the cultural whole should be seen as heuristic and not set in stone. For example, each subsystem is embedded in every other subsystem and what we consider "economic" may be simultaneously "social" or "political." Looking at culture as a system, we see that musicians play roles in their communities; they interact with others. Sometimes music is occasional, that is, it is played for some purpose other than just listening to the music itself (work songs, ritual music, etc.). Sometimes music itself is the occasion, the purpose for w hich people gather to listen and enjoy themselves.

In addition to being a system the cultural whole may be seen as a overarching pattern, with each part of culture reflecting the overall culture. For example, one can examine a lyric to "get at" the social order, to understand it. The lyrics reflect the artist’s view of his world.

If seeing the musician as a part of a social system is the social science of anthropology seeing cultural patterns in lyrics is the humanistic interpret ation in anthropology. A technique on the social science side of anthropology is cross-cultural comparison. It is possible to compare the blues with calypso, even though in some ways they are not comparable. If I state that both the blues and calypso developed in plantation societies, that is a factual, cross cultural comparison. But sometimes the anthropologist attempts to understand the blues or calypso from the points of view of the participants of cultures that produced the music. This is done by using contemporary documents and oral histories and by interpretation of lyrical and other texts. This relativism is a subjective approach to culture; it helps us to understand and to empathize with the participants. It helps us to try to see things as the tradition bearer sees them. If I say that the blues "ain’t nothing but a good man feeling bad" and calypso is "the rattling of the tongue with the music and time" I’m being relativistic by using the lines from a blues and a calypso to describe each genre. The bluesman or calypsonian who sang these lines are sharing their subjective reality with us. The anthropologist, then, interprets that reality and sometimes develops an elaborate exegesis of it in order to "understand" the culture in question.

With these methods I will shape out, as if whittling on two branches that were cut from the same tree, a wood carving of the blues and another one of calypso.

The Roots of Calypso.

Calypso’s homeland is Trinidad and its roots go deep into the nineteenth century. The Spaniards "stole" Trinidad from the Carib and Arawak Indians in the distant past and Britain "stole" the island from Spain in 1797. The British ruled over an island whose population was quite heterogeneous. Most Trinidadians lived on French estates where a creolized Afro-French culture developed. Most of the enslaved population worked in the sugar cane fields and then latter, "in the cocoa." The remaining estates were British or were owned by European or colored planters. After slavery was abolished in 1834, and after a brief indenture of former slaves that ended in 1838, most of the newly freed Creole population worked their own land or moved to or near Port of Spain, Trinidad’s main city, where some kept gardens and worked on docks, in kitchens or were unemployed. The folk music of the rural and newly urban Afro-French Creoles, together with the music, dances, and other customs of the Afro-English Creole s and the indentured Africans, formed the kit bag from which calypso was drawn and shaped.

Understanding the term "creole" is important to this analysis. First, as defined in Trinidad, Creoles are people who are born in the Caribbean of either African or European descent or both. By the first part of the twentieth century Trinidadian Creoles included people of African descent, European descent, and/or Chinese descent, who forged a large, heterogeneous society.

Next, "Creole& quot; is the Afro-French language spoken by Creoles, although in Trinidad that language is called "Patois." Trinidadian Creole or Patois is nearly a dead language, as it is in Grenada and Carriacou although it is still the most commonly spoken language in Haiti and is widely spoken in St. Lucia, Martinique, and in Guadeloupe. In the nineteenth century it was the major language of Carnival and Carnival songs.

Finally, creole –written with a small "c" - refers to the culture of t he Creoles.

By the late nineteenth century, Trinidad’s economy was beginning to diversify from dependence on sugar, cocoa, copra and other crops to include exploitation of oil and pitch. Its natural riches made it one of the wealthiest islands in the Caribbean. By the 1880s, economic changes on the island – the increase of rural people in the city looking for work stimulated the development of a new urban Carnival that had evolved from the French pre-Lenten Carnival in Port of Spain. This jame t (underclass) Carnival included plenty of influences contributed by the descendants of formerly enslaved people and from the once indentured Africans who moved to the outskirts of Port of Spain. Collectively these groups invented a new, bacchanalian fete that was harshly suppressed after a series of riots in the 1880s. From its ashes came another Carnival that combined the joie de vivre of the lumpen proletariat Carnival with certain restrictions placed on it by the British government. This Carnival was supported by middle class Creole Catholics and merchants. It had two new elements: fancy masquerade bands and calypso.

Throughout the nineteenth century the British ruled over a population consisting of elite English bureaucrats and English and French Creole planters (some of whom were colored); middle class merchants from the British Isles, Madeira, India and China; colored middle class teachers, lawyers and lesser bureaucrats; and a lower class consisting of Asian Indian sugar cane workers and Afro-Trinidadian yeoman farmers and urban workers. By the beginning of the twentieth century the French creole culture was folding into a new Anglicized Trinidadian culture. English language calypso emerged at precisely this time, when a new "Anglo-Afro-French" Trinidadian creole culture was born. That new calypso was the symbolic medium, a means of communication, between all elements of the emergent Trinidadian society, except for the Asian Indians.

By about 1900 calypso was the n ame that came to refer to the mostly English language topical music of pre-Lenten Carnival, and then gradually, to the earlier French Creole Carnival songs as well. It encompassed the outdoor Carnival genres of lavway (jumpy Carnival songs in Patois); leggos (songs for the last day of Carnival), kalindas (stick fighters’ songs in English or Patois), and bele or belairs (in Patois). Calypso’s new venue was called a "tent," an arena where calypso was sung. Originally a yard where stick fighters performed and sang their kalindas, the tent was really an open space covered with a tarp, sail, or palm fronds. The tents ushered in the era of formal calypso performance which replaced the Carnival song practices by members of masquerade bands. The first calypso singers were called chantwells, the costumed men who sang calypsos at the head of a group of masqueraders (called a mas band) at Carnival. Classic calypso existed from the late 1890s through about 1962 when Trin idad and Tobago gained independence and government sponsored Carnival, the rise in the popularity of calypso outside Trinidad, and other factors eventually lead to the development of new forms of calypso that are beyond the scope of this paper.

The Roots of the Blues.

Many black Mississippians came from the Carolinas in the antebellum era, especially from the coastal sea islands in the south east of the United States where Gullah culture, perhaps the most intriguing of North American p lantation societies, took hold. From my Caribbeanist perspective, that Gullah culture was really the northern most extension of Caribbean creole culture, which also touched the North American mainland in nearby Charleston, southern Florida (by way of the Bahamas) and in south Louisiana, centering around New Orleans. Other Mississippians came from elsewhere in the rural south.

Mississippi’s political and social history was as volatile as Trinidad’s but different in substance. Mississippi was admit ted into the Union as a frontier southern state in 1817, joined the breakaway confederacy in 1861, and then moved through a series of "occupations" beginning even before the United States Army’s victory at Vicksburg. Then, there was the Reconstruction period, followed by a reactionary plantocracy which did not die out until most African Americans could vote in the 1960s. It is this period after Reconstruction, from about 1875 to about 1960, that most of the Delta lands were cleared for cotton an d the region became what James C. Cobb called "The Most Southern Place on Earth."

Many people who had been enslaved were drawn to the Delta for its relatively high wages and its paternalistic racism as compared to the raw racism of the Mississippi hill country, where many more poor whites lived. Many planters controlled the serf-like sharecroppers and field hands in order to insure that the work would get done. This involved strong influence over the police, sometimes use of extra-legal Klu Klux Klanners and legal White Citizens Councils to enforce white hegemony, and by putting the working population in perpetual debt. For the poor blacks, the Delta became the cruelest of places. For the white plantation owners, the Delta was their kingdom, an indulgent plutocracy. In that inhuman land, in the span of about 85 years, blues was born and was nurtured. A rural West Indian once told me a pithy saying to justify the male dominance over women on his small island. Defying logic, he told me that man "makes" children, not woman. The woman is the manure to grow the seed that comes from man. Well, Mississippi was the manure that grew the blues.

In the 1860s, at about the same time that Port of Spain was filling up with Creoles and a handful of Africans, the Mississippi Delta was being cleared for cotton, in the first phase of a post civil war push that was to see the development of a surreal atmosphere of boom and bust that turned former slaves into sharecroppers, field hands, turpentine workers, mule skinners, track liners, levee camp workers or tractor drivers. If one looks through a dictionary of blues singers born in Mississippi between the 1890s and 1930s, one is struck by the number of men who, while not necessary holding these jobs themselves – remember, many blues singers were drifters – nevertheless came from families whose members built levees, cleared land or worked it for the profit of others (Harris) The vast majority of the blues men who came to this awesome rura l industrial environment settled in Mississippi’s Delta. (John F. Rooney, Jr., Wilbur Zelinsky, and Dean R. Louder, in Cobb 278⁾.

In their "free time" the agrarian workers in Mississippi, together with professional songsters in medicine, minstrel, and vaudeville shows, developed an incipient popular music industry. By the early 1900s several song genres that contributed to the blues were popular in the Delta or in the cities that defined its boundaries and dotted its interior ( Memphis, Clarksdale, Greenville, Vicksburg): ragtime (syncopated composed piano pieces and their folk equivalents played on piano or guitar); coon, minstrel, and vaudeville songs (actually very many styles); field hollers (arhoolies); call and response work songs for lining track, mule skinning in turpentine and lumber camps; religious music (jubilees and spirituals); and children’s songs. For our purposes it is best to not try to give a narrow definition of the blues that resulted from incorporating and b ending these styles to keep up with popular tastes. I prefer to locate blues as the music performed by poor, rural African Americans in Mississippi Delta in clubs or juke joints, on street corners or on trains, at picnics, and for other occasions between about 1890 and 1960. The blues was the bluesman’s way out of that ungodly work environment in which many people in the Delta were caught, like crabs in a barrel as a Creole might say, into a life of poverty, crime, woman bashing, whiskey, despair. Classi c Delta blues ends with the introduction of efficient cotton picking machines that displaced thousands of black workers in the Delta and with the rise of the civil rights movement that changed the power relationship between blacks and whites in the Delta.

Occupation, Class and Ethnicity in Calypso.

By the early 1900s most calypsonians were a generation out of the cane and cocoa and lived in a colony where race and class were not entirely wedded to color. But the vote was not availabl e to any Trinidadian until the 1920s, and then only a few men qualified to vote for local matters; they could not vote on colonial issues nor, of course, on whether or not they wanted to live as colonial charges of the British. Nevertheless, the Afro-Trinidadian population was quite heterogeneous and consisted of elite coloured planters, light and dark skinned professionals, trades people, a large urban proletariat, yeomen farmers, and rural laborers. These Afro-Trinidadian Creoles were biologically mixed with the whites and the Chinese. Individuals identified with one set of their ancestors or another and often as not, with any heritage except an African one. Only indentured Africans, people from the nearby island of Carriacou, and a few others identified with Africa. Calypso was a topical Carnival music that expressed the world of these Creoles in often outrageous, fanciful, or highly sexual lyrics.

In terms of class instead of ethnicity, calypso sprang from two main strata: the Creole professio nals and merchants on the one hand (some of whom were colored and some of whom were from such places as Portuguese Madeira, Syria, India or China) and the proletariat and lumpen proletariat on the other (most of whom were Afro-Trinidadian).

The merchants and professionals sponsored the calypso "tents" where songs were performed. The original calypso tents were located in stick fighters’ yards or in a corner of masquerade camps. Usually they were just an open area with a few chairs or a b ench or two. The first modern tent was set up in 1919 after the Great War. It was sponsored by ticket agent Railway Douglas, a Creole of mixed heritage. He was newly returned from service in north Africa in the British West India Regiment. He covered a yard with a sail, charged for tickets, and hired calypsonians to give forth in nightly pre-Carnival performances of topical songs in the sweet English tongue. Many British had given up their objections to this almost proper Carnival and some of the colon ial elite supported these genteel tents and visited them quite often in the days before radio and television. Douglas himself was a calypsonian and would sometimes sing for an entire hour and a half by himself, with only a string band backing him up. He was insufferably middle class and did not allow African instruments (drums, scraper, other percussion instruments) into his tent. He didn’t like double entendre songs either, although he wasn’t above reporting on scandal, sexual or otherwise. Most of all , calypsos were to be sung in standard Trinidadian English, no Creole English or Patois for Douglas! Most tents incorporated more African musical influences, especially in use of call and response style melodies and use of the tamboo bamboo, stamping tubes that were a subsistution for drums when the laws against the latter were enforced. Tourists were visitors to the tents, even in the early 1900s. In the wilder tents and in the stick fighters’ yards, there were rougher doings out of sight and ear shot o f tourists and elite women. And of course, until the development of the tin pan band – a precursor of the steelband - in the late 1930s, calypso was still sung by chantwells leading masquerade bands for Carnival.

More social and occupational roles were available to the would-be calypsonian and to other colored Creoles than to the bluesman. While most calypsonians were from the grass roots and lived a life style similar to the bluesman (womanizing, drifting from place to place, irregular work habit s, common law marriage) some were middle class and cherished a grammar school or a high school education ("college boys"). Calypso lyrics in the colonial era are full of references to British culture such as Queen Victoria, William the Conqueror, school yard Latin, Victorian poetry (Macaulay, Tennyson, Kipling). Many calypsonians moved between English and Patois or between English and Spanish, sometimes to hide obscenities from the monolingual British.

Occupation, Class and Ethnicity in the Blues.

On the surface at least, the social structure of the Delta was much simpler than the Byzantine society in which the Creole lived: at polar opposites were the African American field hands and the white elite. In between were a few poor whites, Black overseers, a relatively small group of middle class whites and a very small group of middle class blacks. Many Chinese, brought in originally as field hands, left the plantations and opened shops just like in Trinidad and, as in Trinidad, th e Chinese men integrated with the African American Mississippians for a while at least, only later to re-segregate. There were Jewish and Lebanese merchants in the Delta as well (just as in Trinidad where "Syrian" is a generic term for these Levantine people). And there were some middle class African American professionals, especially in teaching, the ministry, and in undertaking. The white power structure allowed more flexibility in these professions, owing chiefly to the fact that they did n ot want this work themselves.

The blues was performed by poor blacks for an audience of peers or for middle class whites. Black blues styles were generally not preferred by poor whites, African American church goers, or by middle class blacks: therefore, the blues expressed the poor black world of suffering, pain, woman problems, and absurd fool-like confrontations with life. The latter songs, taken from minstrelsy, were especially popular among whites as they served to confirm the stereotypes the y had of blacks.

Calypso Performance.

There are no solitary calypsonians, who hum alone, expressing private feelings. A calypso is meaningless, it isn’t even a calypso at all, unless performed for an audience. The outdoor calypsos were a tag of identity for a masquerade band. The chantwell or calypsonian sang out the name and the exploits of the band and challenged all comers to dispute this and to even fight if they disagreed with the chantwells’ braggadocio, as he strutted up the stre et at the head of his masquerade band. This style died in the 1930s and 40s with the rise of the steelband which replaced chantwells leading masquerade bands.

The indoor calypsos were performed in calypso tents. This sort of calypso was for listening, not dancing in an outdoor Carnival "jump-up." Here is a brief description of a tent performance in 1942, written by a North American journalist, during World War II when outdoor Carnival was banned:

Tents set up shop about a month before Carnival for nightly performances that would last for two hours. A master of ceremonies guided the audience through fifteen or twenty singers, who would sing one or two calypsos each. The melodies, at least early on, were old folk tunes. The lyrics were structured, composed songs, occasi onally written by a middle class ghost writer, and were sometimes performed in front of the elite of colonial Trinidad and tourists. The lyrics mentioned peccadilloes, rumors, social issues, stories from newspapers, supposed characteristics of women, or the sexual prowess of the calypsonian. They mostly engaged the external man, the man of words, the mask, the persona, not the inner person.

Blues Performance.

There is an instructive comparison when we note the occasions for, and the plac es where, blues and calypso and their root songs were performed. The roots of the blues range from social church music to individualistic field hollers. Blues singing is sometimes social, as it is in a juke joint, or casual when a blind man sings on a city street corner for small change, or individual when a man strums a guitar alone, as in W.C. Handy’s often quoted passage from his autobiography:

The Mississippi juke joint was the heart of the blues performance. In the summer of 1993 I visited "Junior’s" near Holly Springs several times, one of the last of the old time juke joints that, in some ways, must have been like the jukes of old, say the late 1940s when electric guitars came into vogue. (This is only a few years after the American reporter quoted above described a tent performance in Port of Spain, Trinidad). Junior Kimbrough’s juke joint is a small wooden building set next door to his house, along a country road. Junior Kimbrough opened the place when he was in town, usually on Sunday nights at about 10 PM. If you came late you could easily find "Junior’s" because there would be ten or fifteen cars parked at the side of the road. It only took a couple of dollars to get in (I think Junior ran the juke for fun, not for profit). The lady at a table set by the door stamped your hand with purple ink so you could go in and out at will; this was necessary in those hot summer nights. Inside you first encountered a pool table with a couple of guys playing pool. The walls were painted with portraits of black heroes, most of them women. One side of the space was filled with old convertible couches and there were a few chairs there also. Many of the customers were African Americans in their sixti es or seventies but there were other people of all ages as well as a sprinkling of whites, a few poor whites but mostly college kids from the University of Mississippi in nearby Oxford. By 1 AM Junior was cookin’ - playing guitar with bass and drums behind him. He sang, "I need you baby" over and over while strumming a few notes on his electric guitar. He was "in the groove." The musicians played behind a wire mesh cage, something I had seen in other places. If things got rough the musicians and their instruments would be safe. Every half hour or so Junior would be spelled by his son. I saw some of the older folks doing the "slow drag," a highly suggestive belly to belly dance that dates from the early 1900s.

In the spring of 1959 I was a student at Fisk University, Nashville, Tennessee. While there I recorded a street singer Blind James Campbell and his group. Admittedly this recollection does not refer to the Delta but many Delta singers were street singers and Nashville is not that far from the Delta; so there is some creditability to this description. Down the street from the Ryman Auditorium, the then home of the Grand Old Opry, in front of a "grand old" hotel and near the bus stop, a small string band played for passers by. The members of the band were James Campbell, vocal and guitar, William Ball, vocal and guitar, and Lloyd Bell, trumpet. I didn’t get the name of the forth man, a washtub bass player. Mr. Bell had played for Ringling Brothers Circus and had retired. The bass player said that he once played with the Memphis Jug Band and with vaudeville-blues singer, Ma Rainey. Guitarist William Ball was the youngest of the group and had a Chicago blues sound, the sound that originated in the Delta from where Chicagoans like Muddy Waters learned it. The group also included a washboard player, but he was in the hospital. I watched (and tape recorded) as they played "Ain't Got Nothing To Do," "When the Saints Go Marching In," and other tunes. A few of th eir songs were classic AAB blues. Some of the white people coming out of the hotel would pause a moment or two, listen to the group and then drop a coin into a hat one of the musicians provided for the purpose. On this corner Mr. Campbell and his group mostly played for whites, as the hotel was segregated. Bellhops and a few other African Americans listened also.

Blind James Campbell learned to play the guitar in the late 1920s and turned to playing full time in 1936 after he was blinded in a fac tory accident (Harris 104). His group played the region, including country towns as far as a hundred miles from Nashville, usually for white sponsors: "Them guys can sure drink whiskey. . . Woo wee," he said of his white patrons. For big jobs, a "blowout," the group got $75. "I don't hardly play for the colored people. (But) now I got two colored picnics comin' up. I got one here in July and one here in August. . . I used to play for them right smart but it (got) so they didn't have no money" (p ersonal communication).

Mr. Campbell's music included country standards and a few blues, such as "Undertaker's Blues" and "Numbers Blues." These songs referred to local people and places, perhaps modified from recorded or traditional sources. All of his songs told stories, something he shared with the 'classic' blues singers and the songsters but somewhat removed from the sort of Delta blues that expressed feeling in mosaic form, like the songs of Junior Kimbrough.

Calypso and Religion.< /P>

There is a relationship between calypso and religious music, though indirect. The timing of Carnival - the Monday and Tuesday before Ash Wednesday and the beginning of Lent - is set by the Catholic calendar. It is not a church event but rather, as in medieval Europe, a convenient time to bundle up pre-Christian pagan beliefs in a seemingly secular festival and thereby get them out of the way for truly Christian expressions (Lent and Easter). This Christian calendar made it possible for certain Af rican folk customs to be celebrated at Carnival also, including Carnival bands based on African ethnicity, specific customs such as moko jumbie (a stilt walker), and African-like masquerading such as masques vaguely reminiscent of Yoruba gedele (an ancestor masquerade).

Carnival is a liminal festival in which revelers act out fantasies, moral codes and social relations between classes, ethnic groups, and men and women. Often masquerades are a reversal or absurd parody of customs and n orms, which paradoxically serves to re-emphasize those very ethics and codes. Some of this play acting concerns religious themes and folkloristic beliefs. Even today some people in Trinidad think that certain supernatural characters like Papa Bois (the spirit of the forest) or jumbies (spirits) are real, even though they are parodied in Carnival masquerades. Calypsos were made up about these supernatural creatures. Some classic calypsos, especially the songs of Lord Executor, are rife with myths and spiritually charged ideas, spells, and notions such as lajobless (a supernatural female being who tricks men at night into some unknown but bad fate); the djab djab (a devil masquerade), the loogarou (a witch who has changed from a human into a half-dog or half-donkey), the power of the spoken word or spell, the soucoyan (a female vampire), and obeah (magic).

Some calypsonians were raised in a Christian church; others grew up as a Spiritual Baptist or in the Yoruba faith. Calypsonians often incorporate parodies of religious tunes from these churches and temples into calypso, be it a Yoruban chant or a Spiritual Baptist hymn. As with some blues lyrics – "Ain’t no heaven, ain’t no burnin’ hell" - these take-offs superficially speak against the belief being parodied. But on another level they reveal a strong attachment to a syncretic Afro-Christian supernatural world view.

Blues and Religion.

The blues singer was one of the few creative roles allowed black men in the Delta. There was an interplay between certain male roles that formed the structure of the communities in the Delta - the teacher (also a female role), the preacher, and the bluesman. Whereas teachers and preachers had legitimacy bluesmen were looked down on in proper black circles. They were stereotyped as womanizers, gamblers, drinkers, rounders. The bluesman was an outsider to middle class black culture. The teacher, on the other hand, dealt with this middle cl ass world. They were interested in the mundane, the secular, and the objective. And the preacher was concerned with the souls of his flock and in the proper behavior of getting right with God. The bluesman relished improper behavior.

Some bluesmen alternated between the life of a preacher and the life of a rounder. But even when singing the blues - indeed, especially when singing the blues - the bluesman, like the preacher, dealt with the extraordinary, the extra natural, the supernatural. He w as haunted by the evil side of things, the "helhound" on his trail. As Jon Michael Spencer has noted, from the perspective of the church the blues is evil and anything but religious. But anthropologically speaking, the blues myth - as Spencer notes - and the blues performance - as a post modernist might note - is charged with a mystical aura. Just the mention of the name of Robert Johnson drives this point home. Through his songs one sees the spirit of the crossroads – the Eshu of Yorub a religion or the Legba of the Dahomean faith. This god, often glossed as the "devil," is in fact the blues singer himself. He is Legba, Eshu, the guardian of the crossroads, intermediary between people and the other gods, the trickster. The blues concept of the devil, "me and the Devil," – is essentially a Christian gloss of a West African concept. This West African "devil" is neither good nor bad. This devil is reality, with its ups and downs, with its bad acting women and with "The Man" haunting one’s every move.

This religion in the blues is different from Christianity, but it is no less spiritual. It has an imprint from west African religion mixed in with Christianity and European spiritualism. This African component in blues is easy to recognize for a Caribbeanist. The mojos, spells, the mystical ground of the crossroads, the power of words, the use of Christian imagery - all these referents, like those of the calypsonian, define a li minal space that is not evil as conceived by church folks but actually outside of good and evil. It is the "conundrumic" world of luck, fate, dream books and the numbers racket.

The Effects of Popularization and Commercialization on Calypso.

Both calypso and the blues underwent radical change when they were popularized through sheet music (blues), lyrical broadsides (so-called calypso "copies"), 78rpm phonograph records and radio broadcasts. For example, outdoo r genres of calypso, such as the lavways, show the same lyrical randomness together with mood setting qualities as folk blues (see below). Some of the early calypsos, especially "Iron Duke in the Land," the first recorded calypso in English that has been located (recorded in 1914), are rough around the edges and show folk (oral) traditional process rather than composition or heavy listening to previously recorded calypsos. "Iron Duke in the Land" is a calypso by Henry Julian (a.k.a. Ju lian Whiterose) in which he boasts about roles he portrayed in the White Rose Social Union (his masquerade band) in the 1890s when he was instrumental in developing fancy masquerade bands. But by the late 1920s most recorded calypsos were formal compositions with known or attributed lyricists. Trinidadian pianist, orchestra leader, and calypso promoter Lionel Belasco was the first person to copyright calypsos and thereby render the compositions into a fixed form. Belasco’s copyrighted songs were written by him, were modified by him from folk sources, or were based on the compositions of others. In the 1930s, after Carnival season, well honed songs that had been sung nightly in the tents, were put on wax in New York City or Trinidad on the ARC, Decca, and Bluebird labels.

Calypso was always a music that crossed class boundaries, within Creole culture. But by the late 1930s the double effect of phonograph records on topics with an Anglo-American appeal ("King Edward VIII," "Roosevel t in Trinidad") together with a couple of stands by Gerald Clark and his calypso singers at the Village Vanguard in Greenwich Village, put calypso on the map for New York’s mostly white jet set and ultimately led to an American style calypso boom. Meanwhile, in Trinidad and among Trinidadians abroad, calypso kept moving along on its own merry way.

The Effects of Popularization and Commercialization on the Blues.

Classic blues wasn’t recorded until 1922 and rural folk blues wasn’t rec orded until a couple of years later, well after calypso had been recorded. If we examine the earliest recordings and compare them with later recordings, as first suggested by David Evans w(1982), we see a striking similarity. Some earlier Delta songs (excepting the songsters’ ballads) consist of a string of verses that are not all connected to each other. They present a mood or feeling. Many later songs, probably showing the influence of repeated listening to phonograph recordings of blues by blues sing ers themselves, and to studied composition, exhibit a more formal lyrical structure.

One gets the same feeling of a well rounded song when listening to songsters’ and street singers’ blues compositions. Take for example the songs of Blind Willie McTell or Blind Lemon Jefferson (his later work), neither of whom was a Delta singer. Formal structure is less true of the Delta songs, but one can see the same roundedness in some of Charlie Patton’s songs and in Robert Johnson’s songs, to take two examp les. In the first instance, Patton sang many ballads that no doubt circulated in relatively fixed form before he recorded them. And Robert Johnson had the luxury of playing with some of the greatest Delta singers and also of hearing many blues records.

In addition to forcing changes on the songs, phonograph records put oral traditions found only within closed communities into wide circulation among diverse ethnic groups and social classes. Church going African Americans could enjoy the blues wit hout the fear or shame of going to a juke joint. Young white men could vicariously identify with the sexual explicit lyrics or could copy intricate guitar runs or could even sympathize with the plight of Delta blacks. The story has often been told of how the record industry helped to moved Delta blues from a self contained Black folk music, though a popular music enjoyed by African Americans and whites, to a root of white rock, a mass mediated popular music. The latter stage was achieved with the help o f a group of zealot young white aficionados.

Summary.

Calypso and the blues were bits of culture developed by culturally rich Afro-Americans in impoverished, oppressive, industrializing work environments. In Mississippi, the parents of most blues singers were former slaves or were share croppers. In Trinidad, the parents of calypsonians were yeoman farmers or wage laborers. Sometimes, however, the bluesman and the calypsonian were drifters, commentators on the cultural setting of the wo rking class; but more often they were members of the lumpen proletariat.

The chief difference between the economic setting of calypso and the blues is the fact that the Delta blues developed in a society where plantation workers and share croppers were never far away from destitution. Delta blues reflected that condition. Calypso developed in a more diverse cultural environment where Afro-Trinidadians, although mainly poor, were found in all social classes. Calypso, a medium of expression for t he poor, reflected a class-based and ethnically diverse society.

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