Calypso rose

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Calypso Rose (2016)

Calypso Rose (actually Rose McCartha Linda Sandy Lewis , born April 27, 1940 in Bethel ) is a Trinidadian calypso musician who was the first woman to gain a foothold in this male genre and who subsequently won numerous awards.

Career

Sandy Lewis was born on April 27, 1940 in Bethel in Saint Patrick Parish, Tobago, the fifth of eleven children of a fisherman. Initially, she lived with her parents and siblings in a two-bedroom apartment in Bethel. When she was nine years old, she was placed in the care of an uncle in Barataria , Trinidad.

While calypso music was frowned upon in her strictly religious home on Tobago, it was omnipresent in the environment of her relatives in Barataria. Sandy Lewis had received a musical education and was interested in the genre. In 1955 she wrote her first calypso. In 1956, the newly elected Chief Minister and later first Prime Minister of Independent Trinidad, Eric Williams, visited Tobago and watched a singing performance by Sandy Lewis who was visiting her homeland. He encouraged her, contrary to the social norms of the time, to appear as a woman in a male-dominated calypso tent. Back in Trinidad, Sandy Lewis put the idea into practice and began to sing under the name "Crusoe Kid" at carnival time in calypso tents, initially as a "helper" on a temporary basis, later as a permanent singer with a success-related salary. The stage name "Calypso Rose" was given to her by the successful Calypsonian Mighty Spoiler . From the beginning she was exposed to hostility, especially from church organizations - the male Calypsonians always had a reputation for excessive lifestyle and sexual affairs, so that appearances by women in Calypso tents were viewed as improper. The influential daily newspapers Trinidad Guardian and Evening News called Calypso Rose the "Queen of Smut". Since Sandy Lewis wrote her own songs like all successful Calypsonians and also mastered the guitar and keyboards, she was accepted in the male Calypsonian scene and persistently worked on her career. In 1963 she gave concerts abroad for the first time, winning the Calypso King competition of the American Virgin Islands on Saint Thomas . From 1967 she also took part in the prestigious annual competitions in Trinidad. In 1969, during the ongoing Road March competition , she was urged by the Church to swap lines of text on her competition title Sweet Pudding Man , which still did not bring her victory. When asked, the competition jury told her that you cannot win the competition as a woman. Calypso Rose was not impressed by this announcement. In 1970 the success of her title No Madame , which dealt with the working conditions of female domestic workers, resulted in a change in the law in Trinidad in favor of this occupational group.

Calypso Rose also wrote songs for other artists, so in 1973 under the pseudonym "Lewis McCarth" the song Wah She Go Do for album Takin 'My Time by Bonnie Raitt . In 1975 she received a gold record for her single Do Dem Back . In 1977 she won the Carnival Road March, one of the two major annual Trinidadian music competitions, with the title Give More Tempo . She also won the title the following year. In 1978, with the titles I Thank Thee and Her Majesty, she also won the second major competition Calypso King , which has been called Calypso Monarch since that year . She did not take part in any other competitions. In 1978 the film Bacchanal Time by the Trinidadian director Kamalo Deen was released, to whose soundtrack Calypso Rose contributed pieces and in which she appeared (as herself).

In the 1980s, the Calypso music genre was more and more displaced by the Soca in the Caribbean , which made Calypso Rose's popularity decline. During this decade she primarily released EPs with six tracks each instead of albums . This was due to the fact that Calypsonians mostly work seasonally and release new pieces just before Carnival time in February. As a result, individual tracks from complete albums often received little airplay . For reasons of efficiency, Calypso Rose started the trend towards Calypso EPs instead of full albums. She shifted her focus away from the seasonal business to Trinidad and performed more and more year-round in North America and Europe, but especially in Central American Belize , where she gained a larger fan base. In 1982 she received honorary citizenship of the country. In 1991 the documentary film One Hand Don't Clap by the American director Kaveri Kaul was released, which deals with the life and career of the composer Lord Kitchener and Calypso Rose. In 1993 she received a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Caribbean Music Awards in New York for her services to the calypso. She also received the keys to the city of the Canadian city of St. Catharines , and in 2003 the keys to the US city of Lauderdale Lakes . In 2011 the documentary film Calypso Rose: The Lioness of the Jungle by the Cameroonian director Pascale Obolo was released, which portrays the life and career of Calypso Rose and gives music colleagues such as Destra Garcia and Mighty Sparrow the opportunity to have their say. In the same year she was awarded the Hummingbird Medal in gold by the Trinidadian state . In 2014 she received an honorary doctorate from the University of the West Indies (UWI).

In 2016 she released her album Far From Home , which was partly produced in collaboration with Manu Chao . Also in 2016 she performed at the Roskilde Festival and received the WOMEX Award for Artists. Far From Home was album of the year at the French Victoires de la Musique 2017 in the “World Music Album” category and brought Calypso Rose a platinum record in France . The gold record for Far From Home was the first for an album by an artist from Trinidad and Tobago. Still 2017 type aircraft was Boeing 737 of Caribbean Airlines named after her. In 2019, at the age of 78, she performed at the Coachella Festival in California.

Style and reception

Calypso Rose (2011)

At the beginning of her career, Calypso Rose wrote classic calypso pieces, taking on the tradition of male Calypsonians to incorporate sexual innuendos and ambiguities into their texts, which she underlined with lascivious stage shows. This approach, which was unthinkable in Trinidad until then, increased her popularity, but at the beginning of her career it led to massive hostility in women's rights circles. In the 1970s, Calypso Rose was the first successful woman in the until then completely male-dominated Calypso genre, which the American music ethnologist Shannon Dudley describes as "notoriously sexist". This makes her a pioneer for later female Calypsonians such as Denyse Plummer or Singing Sandra . She names Mighty Sparrow as a formative influence on her music and calls him her "mentor". In the course of her career, Calypso Rose adapted her music to current trends more often. Ivan Duran, producer of the album Far From Home , sees elements of an “electronic soca” in her music from the 1970s and 1980s. Allmusic described the music as percussion and brass- heavy and drew comparisons to the Antiguan Calypsonian Mighty Swallow . The British music magazine The Quietus pointed out that Calypso Rose made the genre Calypso known to a larger audience, not least through her collaborations with Bob Marley and Michael Jackson . In the 1980s, EPs with Punta Rock were also created in the context of various recordings that Calypso Rose recorded especially for her audience in Belize because of their popularity there . In the 1990s, Calypso Rose released pure Soca albums. In 1999 she released a gospel album called Jesus Is My Rock . The album Ringbang Queen , released in 2000, deals with the fusion genre Ringbang that originated in Barbados .

The British Guardian sees Calypso Rose's comeback in the 2010s as a stylistic turning point. While the pieces composed with Manu Chao are "slow-burning pieces in a minor key", her work from the 1970s is more suitable for celebration and is euphoric, sometimes "rebellious" and sometimes with slight ska elements.

As usual in Calypso, Calypso Rose's texts deal with political and social topics. For example, pieces on Far From Home deal with domestic violence against women and cultural identity crises. In particular, her early texts sometimes take an Afrocentric perspective, which, according to the Canadian music ethnologist Jocelyne Guilbault, can be traced back to her ethnic origin and Afro-Creole nationalism in Trinidad following the country's independence in 1962. Allmusic described the lyrics as "often feminist in nature".

"Years gone by, the whole of the Caribbean was highly religious. And in Tobago where I come from they figured (especially the women's groups and the churches) that a woman singing calypso is no woman at all. "

- McCartha Sandy Lewis

Private

Sandy Lewis's ancestors came from what is now Guinea on his mother's side and from South Africa on his father's side. In 1977 she moved to New York , where she worked full-time as a criminologist for a long time . Like her parents, she belongs to the Spiritual Baptist faith and has been ordained minister since 1987 , a position comparable to a pastor . She has been married to a woman in the US since 1995; Homosexuality was a criminal offense in her home country until 2018. In 1996 she had to undergo breast cancer surgery and in 1998 an operation for a stomach tumor. In 2018, Sandy Lewis received a diplomatic passport from her home country.

Discography (excerpt)

  • 1968: Queen Of The Calypso World (Recording Artists)
  • 1971: Calypso Queen of the World ( WIRL )
  • 1972: Sexy Hot Pants (no label)
  • 1977: Action Is Tight ( Charlie's Records )
  • 1978: Her Majesty Calypso Rose (CLO Records)
  • 1979: Mass Fever (CLO Records)
  • 1980: Ah Cant Wait (2000 AD Records)
  • 1980: We Rocking For Carnival ( EP , Charlie's Records)
  • 1981: Mass in California (EP, Straker's Records )
  • 1983: Rose Goes Soca Unlimited (EP, Straker's Records)
  • 1983: Trouble (EP, Straker's Records)
  • 1985: Pan in Town (EP, Straker's Records)
  • 1986: Stepping Out (EP, Straker's Records)
  • 1987: On Top of the World (EP, Straker's Records)
  • 1987: Leh We Punta (EP, Straker's Records)
  • 1989: Soca Explosion (EP, Straker's Records)
  • 1990: Soul on Fire (Ebony Records)
  • 1992: Rosie Doh Hurt Dem (EP, Straker's Records)
  • 1993: Soca Diva (ICE Records)
  • 1993: Breaking the Sound Barrier (EP, Spice Island Records)
  • 1996: Tobago (Blue Wave Records)
  • 1999: Ringbang Queen (ICE Records)
  • 1999: Jesus is my Rock (Rose Records)
  • 2008: Calypso Rose (World Village)
  • 2016: Far From Home (Because Music)
  • 2018: So Calypso! (Because Music)

Filmography

  • 1978: Bacchanal Time (as herself)
  • 1991: One Hand Don't Clap (documentary)
  • 2011: Calypso Rose: The Lioness of the Jungle (Documentary)

Awards

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b TUCOTT.com: Calypso Rose. January 10, 2014, accessed June 18, 2018 .
  2. ↑ a b c d Jocelyne Guilbault: Governing Sound: The Cultural Politics of Trinidad's Carnival Musics . University of Chicago Press, Chicago 2007, ISBN 978-0-226-31060-2 , pp. 102 .
  3. ^ Rita Pemberton et al. a .: Historical Dictionary of Trinidad and Tobago . Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham 2018, ISBN 978-1-5381-1146-8 , pp. 314 .
  4. ↑ TheGuardian.com: Calypso Rose: Far from Home review - a glorious summer album. July 14, 2016, accessed June 27, 2018 .
  5. ↑ Discogs.com: Bonnie Raitt: Takin My Time. Retrieved August 15, 2018 .
  6. ↑ TriniJungleJuice.com: She is Carnival To Honor Veteran T&T Female Artiste, Calypso Rose. December 28, 2010, accessed June 25, 2018 .
  7. ↑ Michael Anthony: Historical Dictionary of Trinidad and Tobago . Scarecrow Press, London 1997, ISBN 0-8108-3173-2 , pp. 89 .
  8. ↑ a b c TheQuietus.com: Carnival Queen Calypso Rose Interviewed. April 21, 2016, accessed June 27, 2018 .
  9. ↑ 7NewsBelize.com: WOMEX Calls The Name of The Rose. October 28, 2016, accessed June 19, 2018 .
  10. ↑ Tony Best: Jamaican singers win top Caribbean Music Awards . In: The Gleaner . March 22, 1993, p. 10.
  11. ↑ a b Joan Rampersad: Another award for Calypso Rose . In: Trinidad Newsday . August 27, 2003.
  12. ↑ JamaicaObserver.com: Calypso Rose wins World Music Award in France. February 12, 2017, accessed June 28, 2018 .
  13. ↑ UWI.edu: UWI to confer 20 Honorary Degrees in 2014 Graduation Ceremonies. June 6, 2014, accessed June 21, 2018 .
  14. ↑ WOMEX.com: WOMEX Awards Archive. Retrieved June 21, 2018 .
  15. ↑ Peter Blood: Calypso rising high with Queen Rose Archived from the original on June 26, 2018. In: Trinidad Guardian . February 11, 2017. Retrieved June 28, 2018.
  16. ^ A b Joshua Surtees: Ever-blooming Calypso Rose . In: Caribbean Beat . No. 142, November 2016.
  17. ↑ CTVTT.com: Honoring Calypso Rose, Name To Be Placed On CAL Airplane. July 13, 2017, accessed June 21, 2018 .
  18. ↑ Buzzfeed.com: This 78-Year-Old Artist Just Became Coachella's Oldest Performer, But She's Actually Been Making History Since 1955. Retrieved April 22, 2019 .
  19. ^ Shannon Dudley: Carnival Music in Trinidad: Experiencing Music, Expressing Culture . Oxford University Press, New York 2004, ISBN 0-19-513833-3 , pp. 34 .
  20. ↑ NALIS.gov.tt: The Evolution of Calypso Music. Accessed June 28, 2018 .
  21. ↑ Allmusic.com: Calypso Rose: Artist Biography. Retrieved June 27, 2018 .
  22. ↑ Serafin Méndez-Méndez: Notable Caribbeans and Caribbean Americans: A Biographical Dictionary . Greenwood Publishing, Westport 2003, ISBN 978-0-313-31443-8 , pp. 82 .
  23. ↑ a b TheGuardian.com: Calypso Rose review - coquettish, celebratory turn from carnival queen. November 15, 2016, accessed June 18, 2018 .
  24. ↑ Joshua Surtees: Calypso Rose, an icon for LGBT Caribbean . In: Trinidad Newsday . January 13, 2019.
  25. ↑ Marlene Augustine: Calypso Rose gets diplomatic passport. In: Trinidad Newsday. March 21, 2018, accessed on July 23, 2018 .
personal data
SURNAME Calypso rose
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Sandy Lewis, Rose McCartha Linda (real name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Trinidadian calypso musician
DATE OF BIRTH April 27, 1940
PLACE OF BIRTH Bethel , Trinidad and Tobago