In May 2024, the jukebox musical about the life of calypso pioneer Calypso Rose made its debut in Trinidad & Tobago. Queen of the Road: The Story of Calypso’s Rose detailed her life and development over 40 calypsos, and – critically – showed the misogyny of rival calypsonians and a male-centered society that rejected many calypso women.
Calypso Rose was a warrior – breaking the rules, turning the tides, and creating a space for future women on stage and on the record. She paved the way for countless female calypsonian and soca artists. But first, a little history.
Today’s female calypsonian and soca artists descend from a long line of women who began their singing and carnival careers on the other side of polite society – the underclass Diameter (the French word from which the Patois “jammette” flows).
Underworld was prevalent in Trinidad’s carnival in the late 19th century – singers, drummers, dancers, fighters (both male and female), prostitutes and pimps and more. The protest includes unique characters with memorable names: Bodicia; Alice Sugar and her younger sister Piti Belle Lily; Cariso Jane; Mossie Millie; Ocean Lizzie; Sybil Steele; Ling Mama; Dear Dan; Hard Back Doris; Baje; Annie Coals and Myrtle the Turtle.
These women were early subjects kaisos (the West African music from which calypso evolved, and a word sometimes used interchangeably with calypso) – being checked by name in the lyrics. For example, Cedric Le Blanc – the famous White sing (kaiso singer) – reported singing in 1873:
The Bodicea diametti we all know
It is a real shame for us cariso
I really can’t understand it
Why didn’t she take English training.
Women’s influence and power were critical to the evolution of calypso in a male-dominated society. Regulations and ordinances of 1882-1884 to ban carnival activities drove men underground, suppressing Kalinda song (war stick).
Women were more direct—even combative—and continued their opposition to legal restrictions. They continued to sing theirs cariso – songs full of spots (part of the evolution of calypso) that were also full of humor picong (mocking sneer).
In 1883, a Trinidad newspaper described the obscene songs as “imitations of the licentious songs of Curaçao, from which island they were first brought and practiced here by a BIMBIM and her equally licentious daughters, which every night, to the peculiar music of their Quelbays (song and dance), passed through the most lustful lusts, indicative of the sensual vocation to which they abandoned themselves.”
THESE chanterelle (female singers) became the foundation upon which female calypsonians and modern female soca artists developed. Academics and scholars have raised and defended a thesis that the restrictions made by those ordinances showed that male singers acquiesced and eventually adopted women’s less gladiator charizots as the new normal.
An anodyne kind of calypso evolved in the 20th century with men in charge, effectively double entender (double meaning) and humor over aggression – man of words over man of war. It would not be far-fetched to suggest that without women there would be no modern calypso and no soca without modern calypso.
The idea of women singing more than being singers spread in the male-dominated calypso arena of the 20th century. Iconic calypsonian Atilla the Hun recorded the calypso “Deliso” in 1938, which included the stanza:
In those days women sang calypso
Like Sophie Mattaloney and Maribon
He used to walk with a boule-difé*
I mean, in the days of Canboulay.
(* a kerosene bottle with a lit rag, similar to a Molotov cocktail)
This name – Sophie Mattaloney – appears again in newspaper reports of the time as the singer of the Guadalupian song “Estomac-li bas”, also called “Pauline”. It was considered by some experts to be the most popular carnaval song of 1908, similar to a modern-day street march – the first for a woman.
History regards her as a “jammette matador” or, as the press had noted during several mentions, a “woman of the jammette world known for ‘disturbing the peace'”.
Despite Mattaloney’s apparent pioneering achievement, misogyny and jealousy; the perverse degradation of low or intimate quid pro quos; and a colonial Victorian social environment that confined island women to domestic roles—certainly not the calypso tent—collectively subjugated women’s careers, with their achievements in the arts during the first half of the 20th century only excavated by scholars and journalists years later.
In 1914, for example, unnamed women were part of the chorus singing with Julian Whiterose in the first English calypso recording and in the original carol songs. Critically, some women were made to become outsiders—or, more accurately, pioneers.
Women’s influence and power were critical to the evolution of calypso in a male-dominated society
Lady Trinidad (Thelma Lane) was the first woman to perform in a tent as a special act in 1935, and the first to record a calypso in 1937. An apocryphal story about rival calypsonians Roaring Lion and Atilla the Hun suggesting to businessman Eduardo Sa Gomes that Ms. Trinidad was too attractive to visit the United States (USA) to record and perform on the radio without foreign men chasing her away for marriage denied her and the world another female calypsonian first.
Her pioneering moves led to small steps: two more women entered the tent scene in 1936 – Lady Baldwin (Mavis Baldwin) and Lady MacDonald (Doris MacDonald). Lady Iere (Maureen St John) – first with her husband, Lord Iere, and later alone – continued the slow march of female solo calypsonians over the next 20 years. However, the number of women’s recordings over the next two decades is in doubt, as record masters were destroyed by Decca and others.
It wasn’t until the mid-to-late 1950s—when Calypso Rose (Linda McCartha Sandy-Lewis) entered the calypso tent, along with Singing Francine (Francine Edwards)—that there was a growing movement toward female participation in live and industry registration sectors.
Only in the nearly three intervening decades that included Rose’s entry and her first doubles for a woman in 1978—winning the Calypso King contest (rechristened genderless as the Calypso Monarch) and the Road March crown, which was its second in consecutive years – made tenta begins to include more women, although unfortunately still in low numbers.
Rose writing and performing her own songs should have inspired a new group, but calypso songs written by men still dominated songs sung by women.
Society in Trinidad had changed in the 21st century. Machismo reluctantly called for pragmatism, and when a woman made a move, everyone got on board. Estimates were low, but apparently not far off—a hopeful sign.
Singing Sandra (Sandra DeVignes-Millington) was the second woman to win Calypso Monarch in 1999, and again in 2003 (making her the first to win twice). Her triumphs, along with that of Denyse Plummer (who won in 2001) showed little progress at the start of the new century. Karene Asche (2011) and Terri Lyons (2020) also won the Calypso Monarch. Nearly a decade passed between each of the last three victories.
FThe winning women of more than a century of calypso racing repeats a pattern of indifference in the calypso tents – but not on the street. Sanelle Dempster won the Road March in 1999 (the second by a woman), followed by three wins by Fay-Ann Lyons between 2003 and 2009; Patrice Roberts duetting for a win in 2006; and in 2010 the country elected its first female prime minister.
In the 50 years that soca has become the de facto music not only of Trinidad Carnival, but of carnivals throughout the Caribbean diaspora, there has been a marked change in both participation and performance. Destra Garcia, Fay-Ann Lyons, Nadia Batson and Barbadian Alison Hinds have been stars in the soca pantheon for decades, along with more recent superstars Patrice Roberts and Nailah Blackman. (All submitted by Caribbean Beat, including covers on Batson, Hinds and Calypso Rose.)
It would not be far-fetched to suggest that without women there would be no modern calypso and no soca without modern calypso.
They were writing their own songs and their own performances and, in a sense, recapturing the attitude of the carnivalesque of the late 1800s, owning their bodies and desires without having to be “explained” by experts who preached sobriety; being defiant in the face of sectors seeking to censor dance moves; and the normalization of what was considered provocative. Female objectification in song continued, but some singers were redefining it on record, on stage, and on their own terms.
In 2004, calypso scholar Rudolph Ottley and his team founded Cabaret Divas Calypso – an uncensored female voice at the Trinidad Carnival – to offer an all-female cast as an alternative to the declining popularity of the modern calypso tent and to provided a fillip for the still extremely low percentage of female calypsonians singing in established tents.
Two decades later, a man – Machel Montano – was the “attraction” in Cabaret, ironically reflecting the position of Lady Trinidad from 1935.
Trinidadian society has evolved and with the majority of masqueraders and steel players being women, it was inevitable that women’s participation in calypso would follow an increasing trajectory – almost 50% of contemporary tent casting.
Women played a major role in developing the style and performance of calypso in the face of early prohibition ordinances, and in returning a once-dominant Creole dance and performance aesthetic to the art form. Women in calypso are not a passing fad, but an enduring and successful reality.
