ESSAY: Calypso as Comment, Gordon Rohlehr, 1979

Editors, The Black Agenda Review

21 Oct 2026

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“So the calypso ceases to be entertainment on a trivial level and becomes a vehicle whereby the society is going back and searching for its soul.”

Slinger Francisco, aka The Mighty Sparrow, aka the Calypso King of the World, passed away on 27 September 2026. Born in Grand Roy, Grenada on 9 July 1935, Francisco moved to Trinidad and Tobago — to the Port of Spain suburb of Laventille — as an infant. He began singing as a small child, played pan as a youth, and, early in his career as a calypsonian, he was dubbed the “little sparrow” by his peers for his energetic movements on stage. As the Mighty Sparrow, Francisco became known both for his witty, wild, and ribald lyrics, and for his incisive political and social commentary. His career went international. From being a local star in Port of Spain, he found success in London, New York, and Miami — while always returning to perform in Trinidad.

To mark The Mighty Sparrow’s passing, The Black Agenda Review reprints the 1979 essay “Calypso as Comment” by the late Caribbean scholar Gordon Rohlehr. Rohlehr was the greatest scholar calypso has known, and he has a place among the foremost Caribbean literary and cultural critics. His 1967 address, “Sparrow and the language of calypso,” given at a session of the Caribbean Artist Movement (CAM) in London and reprinted in the CAM journal Savacou in 1970, was among the first serious treatments of the Mighty Sparrow’s lyrics. Rohlehr followed this up with numerous talks and lectures on the genre, including the landmark history Calypso and Society in Pre-Independence Trinidad (1990), and the comprehensive collection My Whole Life is Calypso: Essays on Sparrow (2015).

First published in the BBC publication The Listener, Rohlehr’s essay, “Calypso as Comment” offers a concise overview of calypso’s history, while arguing that calypso has always been a political form, a genre that offered a platform for social critique of power and authority. To prove his point, Rohlehr draws on the lyrics of Lord Executor, Chalk Dust, Attila the Hun -– and, of course, Slinger Francisco, aka The Mighty Sparrow, aka the Calypso King of the World.

We reprint Gordon Rohlehr’s “Calypso as Comment” below.

Calypso as Comment

Gordon Rohlehr

It is a well-known fact that, in quite a number of African societies, particularly in West African societies, when you are allowed to mock at authority, and you are permitted to do this, within the format of a performance, maybe a folk-tale, maybe through proverbs, it may be through songs.

What I am saying is that the African origin has to be start, as a basis, as something which underwent a number of transformations–because of the very nature of Trinidad society, of the polyglot nature of that society—the large numbers of people who were fed into that society which kept it perennially restless, of the early process of urbanisation—for example, of movement away from the land-as well as of the constant immigration. Which meant that the society had to be constantly indigenising people, making them Trinidadian. Now, given that, it is far more fascinating looking at what happened African element, at what happened to that base: how it was transformed by the Spanish element coming in through the peons from Venezuela, as well as by the remnants of Spanish-speaking peoples in Trinidad; the French element coming through places like Carriacou, St Lucia, Grenada, Dominica, Martinique, for Trinidad was always the centre for the southern Caribbean and there was a lot of people migrating into it. And they brought with them their musical forms and those forms were fed into the calypso.

In the 19th century, there were a number of recognisable forms. One which still exists is called the calinda. In Trinidad, it was the form to which people danced as they played the stick-fight, and what you had was a basic call and response pattern. This form was prevalent, not only in the country districts, but in the rural areas when the process of urbanisation started in the 1840s: in the post-emancipation period–the 1850s and 1860s—you would find people gathering according streets where they lived or according to the yards that they lived in; each yard probably had its own singer and its own chorus.

A lot of the rhetoric of the stick-fight had to do with a sort of ritual boasting, and a lot of the words which were sung were meant to demoralise an opponent. Now this sort of thing is quite similar to what, say, Muhammad Ali used to do in boxing-the whole business of demoralising an opponent before you actually got into the ring.

Another form of verbal encounter which was also part of the traditional calypso was the minor, or oratorical, calypso. My notion of what happened in the oratorical calypso was that the real violence of the stick-fight was translated into a sort of verbal violence: in other words, you now attempted to flatten the opponent through the power of words rather than through the power of blows. So you now had to insult him in song. One of the ways of doing this was using as many polysyllabic words as possible, thus displaying the superiority of your learning over his:

The earth a-trembling and a-tumbling and heavens are falling.

And all because the Lion is roaring,

My tongue is like the blast of a gun,

When I frown monarchs are going to bow down to the ground,

Devastation, destruction, desolation and damnation,

All these I'll inflict on insubordination,

For the Lion in his power

Is like the rock of Gibraltar.

This particular example of the oratorical calypso was performed by Lord Executor, who was one of the oldest calypsonians, with Lord Caressor, Attila, and the Roaring Lion, and they combined to sing it against one of their brethren whose name was Houdini. The first singer is Executor and he begins with a chorus which goes something like this:

At last, the hour of vengeance is at hand,

I am in the land.

At last, the hour of vengeance is at hand,

I am in the land

The Lord Executor's word of command

Those who boast that Houdini can sing,

In my opinion, they know nothing,

For it's all propaganda, deceit and pretence,

He hasn't a shadow of intelligence.

The money that was spent on his slates and

books

Has not improved his manners and looks;

He has a good inclination

But foreign education

In this colony

With my glittering sword in hand

Tell Houdini

This is the hour of destiny

In this colony.

“In this colony”: is, in fact, a substitution for an older refrain which was called sans humanité, without humanity, which I believe was taken over from the stick-fighting chants and inserted in this new form, which was quite different. This is an eight-line form. And then Attila the Hun continues:

From the very first day that I was born

Men like Houdini started to moan;

Monarchs wept and princes cried

When they saw this new star up in the sky;

Astronomers in my horoscope said

I’d be proud, grand, illustrious and great

And they named me Attila,

The terror, the brutal conqueror

Master mi minor.

This form of verbal violence is part of a whole number of such forms. It had something to do with literacy—these were clearly people who were proud of their ability to speak English. It is not so far removed from what was happening in, say, Victorian England: if you look at the kind of literature they were reading and the word games that they had in the music halls and things like that, you have, essentially, an urban proletariat which was moving into literacy, enamoured of the sound of the word. But, in Trinidad, you have something a little more complicated because you are moving from French Creole into literacy in English and, in a number of the sans humanité calypsos, a calypsonian taunts another calypsonian with not being able to sing in English, not being able to fit the English words into the rhythm of the line.

I would say that, up until the Thirties, calypsonians were part of what can be called a folk urban culture–people coming from villages and living in towns which are not quite cities, in which people still know one another.

The calypsonians have consciously or unconsciously reflected the lifestyle and the incidents which take place from day to day in lower-class society and, in this sense, there has always been social commentary. But, in a more particular sense, they have also charted the political evolution of Trinidad.

In the Forties, it took the form of pushing for local people in things like the city council, in the legislative council, and so on, and got to the point where a calypso-nian became deputy mayor of Port of Spain, which was quite a thing because the deputy mayors and mayors of Port of Spain in the Twenties and the Thirties were fairly successful lawyers and doctors. The calypsonian was Raymond Quevedo, who sang under the name of Attila the Hun and sang about political issues. And since he was one of the masters of the impromptu calypso, he could sing about something which had happened that very day:

Happy days are coming back again,

Join with me and sing a sweet refrain,

The government have got a five-year plan

That will relieve the depression,

No more starvation,

Emancipation is here!

In a period of turmoil and demonstrations and protests, and so on,it was an enormous victory at the time to have a five-year plan passed by the British which would get more jobs for the people, more amenities for the population.

A mammoth engineering job has been achieved, you said,

I mean, the harbour scheme that has been completed,

Port of Spain will hold her place as

The premier city in the West Indies,

No starvation,

Emancipation is here.

And he sang, too, against the attempts to censor the calypso in the 1940s. These attempts generally took the form of sending policemen with notebooks to take down the words. Now, the calypsos had the intent of, as it were, singing the new régime into power, the People's National Movement.

After 1956, by and large, a fairly large number of calypsonians sang in support of and in praise of the new government, and this went on, I think quite consistently, until, say, the mid-Sixties. Then came a new generation of young calypsonians who began to criticise the government. First of all, they began to react to clichés about Trinidad as having oil, as having sugar, as having a lake of pitch, as having a sound economy, as being a place in which people were happy, and so on. They recognised things like mounting unemployment, they picked out areas of nepotism in the government; they began singing about the divorce of the government from the people–calypsos like Sparrow's “Get the hell out of here”:

I am going to bring back Solomon,

Who don't like it, complain to the commission

None of them going to tell me how to run my country

I defy any one of you to dictate for me.

I am no dictator

But when I pass an order

Mr Speaker, this matter must go no further.

I have nothing more to say,

And it must be done my way,

Come on, come on, come on, we been done for the day

This land is mine,

I am the boss,

What I say goes,

Who vex lost.

I say that Solomon will be minister of external affair.

If you ain’t like it–

Get to hell out of here.

The son of the minister of home affairs, the minister in charge of the police, is arrested. The father goes to the police station, snatches the keys from the station sergeant, opens the cell and takes the boy out, walks down the stairs and out again. The prime minister calls a public meeting, and tells the population he is transferring the man, Dr Solomon, to the ministry of external affairs, and he says, “If you don't like it, get to hell out of the country.”

I am going to do what I feel to do

And I couldn't care less who vex or who get blue,

And if you want to test how strong in a election,

Let we bet some money, I givin' odds ten to one.

I control all the money

That pass through this country,

And they envy me for my African safari.

I'm politically strong,

I am the weight of Kong

Don't argue with me-you can't beat me in John-John.

Who's not with me

Is my enemy

And dust will be their destiny

If I say that Solomon will be minister of

external affair

And you ain't like it-

Get to hell out of here!

Then there was an even younger generation coming up, spearheaded by Chalk Dust in 1968, and they began to sing on things like devaluation, sedition. And they are singing about a dispossessed youth, one among whom there is a large percentage of unemployment and who have nowhere to go. And you get then a growing sharpness of commentary-you get the whole business of black power feeding into the calypso and you get calypsos like “Black is Beautiful” by Duke in 1969. Chalk Dust's “Massa Day Must Done,” which reversed a statement made by the prime minister of Trinidad in 1961 –”Massa Day Done.” Chalk Dust is saying that he does not see any change, that there are still areas of racial prejudice, of entrenched superiority, race superiority, in terms of things like business and in terms of the attitudes which go with elitism and poverty in any social situation.

Chalk Dust sings as though he is worried about the Sedition Act which was passed by the attorney-general, Karl Hudson Phillips. When he says “Ah ‘fraid Karl’, it is the attorney-general who is going to put him in prison:

Like my my friends and them do' like me

They want police hold Chalky

All the things they want me sing 'bout

This government go jail my snout.

They want me to sing and say

Who built La Basse from the highway

And have the whole stench install

Right inside the heart of Whitehall.

But not me, ah 'fraid Karl,

Ah 'fraid Karl,

Ah 'fraid he jail me like he jail Rex Lassalle.

They want me to sing 'bout when Bhadese died

Kamal Mohammed break down and cried,

But not me, ah 'fraid

They say a young minister was found

In a hotel with a call-girl in town

But I ain't singing 'bout that,

Ah fraid the Sedition Act

Now what has been happening in the case of the protests is very fascinating. Valentino, who is an important political calypsonian, sings a calypso like “This Place Nice” – and that calypso ironically refutes all the cliche notions of Trinidad as being a tourist’s paradise, as being a place which has solved all its problems. He says: “Yes, this place is nice, but for whom? It’s nice for the businessman, it may be nice for the visitor who comes, but it’s certainly not nice for a large number of the people living here, and he cites a number of reasons why it is not nice. But what is interesting is the form of the calypso. The form is of the very traditional minor calypso that we have been talking about the sans humanite calypsos, the oratorical calypsos. He actually goes back to an old form, builds on it, develops it to make a comment about a very contemporary situation.

So the calypso ceases to be entertainment on a trivial level and becomes a vehicle whereby the society is going back and searching for its soul. And one of the ways of doing this is going back to the minor calypso, which reverses the whole idea of the calypso as laughter, the calypso as entertainment; it is now the calypso as reflection, the calypso as a way of meditating on what is taking place in the society.

Gordon Rohlehr, “Calypso as comment,” The Listener (1 Feb. 1979)

Music

Calypso

Caribbean

political commentary

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