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“PLAY
ONE”: A 70TH BIRTHDAY SALUTE TO THE BLACK
STALIN
Caldwell Taylor
The
occasion of his seventieth birthday anniversary offers
us all a very privileged moment to garland calypsonian
Black Stalin’s bardic genius, which has educated
and entertained us for well over a half a century. As
educator (and Rastafarian) Stalin has trod a road blazed
by a cohort of rebels, including
John
Jacob Thomas, CP David, Edgar Maresse -Smith, Emmanuel
“Mzumbo “Lazare, Henry Sylvester-Williams, Canon Phillip
Douglin,
CLR James,
George Padmore, Buzz Butler, Elma Francois, Claudia
Jones,Eric Williams, Patrick Solomon, “Growling Tiger”,
“Attila
the Hun’,Patrick “Chinee” Jones.
Note
the prominence of the calypsonian among the
rebels, and note as well the fact that very many bards
saw (and continue to see) the calypso form’s first
social responsibility as that of venting the grievances
of the street, the yard . Calypso has a stainless record
of fight; a sustained fight that should easy
qualify the calypsonian to be named among Shelly’s
“unacknowledged legislators of the world”.
It was in
the exercise of the bards’ self-imposed social duty that
Possum,
who
followed his father, Ofuba, into calypso, mounted
an 1860 protest before the Governor’s mansion. Just
one year prior the famed Carib calypsonian, Surisima,
rushed to a Port of Spain hotel to lampoon
William Moore, an American visitor to Trinidad, who
in the course of a lecture on birds of the island
offered the view that the calypso was a mere tropical
expression of the British and American ballad.
Moore
you liar from America,
Tell me
way you know about calypso,
sang an
irate Surisima and his vociferous la vway.
This
incident occurred in the year 1859, exactly one hundred
years before Leroy Calliste became “ Stalin”. It
was the Lord Blaikie (1932-2005), a self-named
warlord, who turned Leroy Calliste into the
Mighty Stalin, and more than fifty later the matter is
still heavy with intrigue: Why “Stalin” for a
calypsonian ‘s sobriquet?
Joseph
Stalin
(1878-1953), the Soviet leader from the 1930s until his
March 1953 death, was in the late fifties still widely
esteemed in Trinidad and elsewhere in the
English-speaking Caribbean: In the popular mind Joseph
Stalin was seen as the “breaker “ of Hitler and warlord
Lord Blaikie was almost certainly to be numbered
amongst the admirers of the man who broke the Fuhrer’s
damnable Operation Barbarossa. Leroy Calliste
became Stalin just five years following the death of the
Russian helmsman: Blaikie would certainly have seen a
“breaker” in the apprentice calypsonian.
STYLE
“I grow
up in a God-fearing home and
I couldn’t go on stage, night after night,
and sing smut with my mother still alive”
-Black
Stalin
Black
Stalin is always eager to talk about the “ bits and
pieces” he had “soaked up” from calypso masters like
“Tiger”, “Spoiler”, “Unknown”,” “Kitchener “,”
Sparrow”, “Melody” et al. Those influences are noted
and noted too is the fact that Stalin has stamped
calypso with his own style and accents. Two of Stalin’s
many gifts bear noting: his generosity, and his sense
that literature is superior to history, something that
keeps him in the company of
Aristotle
and Derek Walcott. Stalin’s estimate of the value
of literature is splashed over songs like “Doctor Jit”
and “ Tribute to Sundar Popo”. In the latter song
Stalin says: “In our music it ent have no race”.
The 1995 Stalin-Sundar dance was a conversation across
an abyss, a triumph of literature over history,
and a critical intervention in race relations in
Trinidad and Tobago: it remains a most sacred moment in
the story of modern Tand T. And wish it will ever be
so.
LIFE
Leroy
Calliste (Stalin), who was born on September 24, 1941,
made his calypso-singing debut in 1959. Before coming to
the calypso stage Calliste , who quit the Fernando
Boys’ Roman School in 1957, worked as a tally clerk at
the Point a Pierre docks: he also did a stint as a limbo
dancer. But calypso was all the young man wanted to do
and this he made clear In his very song, “Why I want to
be a Calypsonian” . He has succeeded in Spades and
has been rewarded for his contributions.
Along the
way Stalin claimed five Trinidad and Tobago calypso
monarch crowns ( 1979, 1985, 1987, 1991, 1995); he won
the 1999 Kind of Kings contest and in 2008 the
University of West Indies conferred him with an
honorary doctorate, Doctor of Letters.
Permit me
to return to Stalin’s generosity, something I sampled
back in 1979 when as Grenada’s secretary for
information and culture (deputy minister), I hosted
Stalin , Valentino, Gypsy, Roy Cape.
The quartet had come to serenade the revolution.
They did at their own expense! Stalin was the
unofficial leader of the group and what a leader he
was. My memories of those 1979 days shall forever remain
raw: Indeed, they are a fan’s puny down payment
on the prodigious debt owed to a cultural colossus.
Play One!
September
24, 2011 |
