History of Calypso

Last Sunday my brothers got into some argument about the number of times Educator had been Calypso Monarch and the titles of the songs with which he had won. Since they were nowhere near a computer I got the call the do the research which of course I did on luciancarnival.com. But the question got me to thinking.....what did we really know of the history of calypso? My first memories of carnival and calypso are walking down Cedars speaking to my friends about Invader's 'Carnal Knowledge' and jumping on the Chausee to 'Second Hand Needle'. Really I was jumping to 'One Bad Prick'. Yeah, I know the two songs were years apart but that is how my memory works. Does yours work in perfect sequence?

To make things worse my first tent was in 1997.....yeah 1997. So really I am a novice. I decided that I needed to do some real research about the history of calypso. But where to start? I remember that I had spoken to Mark Louis one day at length about the very subject and decided that the next time I saw him I would ask where I could start. I was eventually directed to Timothy Alfred and Mark Phillip, popularly known as Jackson, as perhaps the best sources of information on the history of calypso. Now I needed to find them. That search led me to Bingo who was able to tell me how I could contact Jackson and Paul 'Jimmy' Wilson, another authority on the subject.

However, before I could set up and conduct any of what I thought were ground-breaking interviews, I was directed to the library at the Folk Research Centre. There I stumbled on a treasure trove. It seemed that everything I wanted or needed to know about the history of Calypso was captured in the various editions of Lucian Kaiso. I was particularly enthralled with the Number one issue which had come out in Febuary of 1990.

Lucian Kaiso is exceedingly well researched and beautifully written. I could not resist purchasing a copy for only $10.00, a steal considering it costs $15.00 back when it was first published. I could never do as good a job of capturing the history of Calypso as the Folk Research Centre has done. If you would like to read about Calypso in St. Lucia then all you have to do is take the trek up the the Folk Research Centre. To whet your apetite we have published a few excerpts from No 1 February 1990 Lucian Kaiso in the Calypsoca Section of this website. Happy reading.