THE EDITOR: This letter is written as a contribution to Calypso History Month
In 1955, as a middle teenager, I would stealthily steal away from the boarding house at 39 Ana Street, Woodbrook and find my way to the Young Brigade tent at the western end of Duke Street.
There I saw and heard perform calypsonians the likes of the Mighty Spoiler, Lord Melody, Pretender, Commander and many others of that era. There was no sign of the 19-year-old who would take the calypso world by storm, win the crown the following year (1956) with Jean an' Dinah, and change calypso forever.
The Jean an’ Dinah tune (with different lyrics), originally created by the composer to be sold as an advertising jingle for the Salvatori Scott store at the end of Frederick Street, was rejected, for the princely sum of $2. The person who rejected it was related to my personal physician and unknowingly did us and our culture a great favour.
In 1958, or thereabouts, Slinger Francisco, aka the Mighty Sparrow, goes to British Guiana (now Guyana) and contacts a dentist. This dentist, who is the president of the League of Coloured People, welcomes Sparrow and introduces him to all the bandleaders and those in music.
Every year this dentist would organise night concerts, some lasting a week or more. Sparrow welcomes the opportunity to practise his craft without being judged, which gave him the freedom to experiment and which he said helped to make him the professional he became.
When I reminded Sparrow that the precocious pre-teen in their company (the son of the dentist Claude Denbow Snr) would keep singing calypsoes like The Lizard and Benwood Dick to the consternation of his mother and is now a practising attorney, Claude Denbow SC, in TT, he buss out a laugh and expressed his desire to meet him and to thank him for all that his father did for him. Geographic location prevented that. However, Sparrow’s wife Margaret arranged for them to speak on the phone – Trinidad to New York.
The above information was given to me personally by the Mighty Sparrow, while we were both sheltering from a thunderstorm in the gallery of a doctor’s office in upper Woodford Street.
DENIS IMBERT
via e-mail
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