MUSIC: Calypso Xmas in Trinidad-Tobago

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Vaneisa Baksh

PORT OF SPAIN, Dec 22 1998 (IPS) - Owen Reyes Johnson, known by all here as ‘Scrunter the Calypsonian’, stamped his mark on the caribbean music world the moment he recorded his first hit in 1980.

That was the year of his runaway success, ‘Woman on the Bass’, a calypso describing a boycott by the steelbands and referring to the revellers’ desire for the woman playing the bass pans.

It also was the year of another classic, ‘Take the Number,’ advising young girls to get the registration number of vehicles before getting into cars with strange men. These were the first of a string of hits which included ‘Crapaud Revolution,’ and ‘The Will.’

That last song had been derived from his relationship with the legendary ‘Lord Kitchener’, who has a very special regard for him, and whose style people said has deeply influenced Scrunter’s music.

Aside from the praise earned over the past 18 years for his contributions to the calypso archival memory, Johnson has created a new image for himself with a host of songs celebrating Christmas Caribbean style.

The Caribbean Christmas is a reflection of the myriad cultures which have created it. In Trinidad and Tobago, the Spanish influence is best represented in the parang, a folksy kind of Spanish music dominated by the cuatro and the maracas.

It has evolved, like most of the other musical forms into a hybrid which includes calypso, soca, parang, and lately, even the East Indian ‘chutney’ rhythms. It is sung in a mixture of English and Spanish, with English now being offered in greater lyrical quantities.

Scrunter’s entry into that genre had begun the year before, in 1990, when he decided “I must do a parang,” and sat down on a big stone under a mango tree in the large paved yard of his east Trinidad pub – called ‘Scrunter’s Forest’ – to write.

He wrote the lines for ‘Piece-ah pork’ right there, drawing easily on his lifelong experiences of Christmas in the country, as he calls it. That song describes his longing for a piece of pork – above and beyond any other Christmas goodies – and its lyrics are fairly saucy.

On Christmas Day, he says, everybody stayed home. But 24 hours later the roving began, gathering momentum as friends dropped in on each other, taking a drink, eating a little something, then taking off for yet another home with yet another merry body in tow – Christmas spirits rising rapidly as day made night.

That is the kind of Christmas he loves and has lived all his life, and on this day when he sat down in the shade of that young mango tree to write, he thought about the kind of communal feeling evoked by the late parang legend Daisy Voisin, and he wanted to transmit this too.

“Pork is one of the main things for Christmas for us,” he says. “Long before Christmas Eve night, men done have they three piece of wood, and they coals and they big pan, and they ready to kill the pigs before Christmas.”

“From small…” he says, he used to mind pigs. He was the first of nine children, and he was always looking out for the younger ones. He began raising pigs, starting with two and up with about 40 – of which he slaughtered at least seven every Christmas.

This readying of the pigs for the hams, the pastelles, and the roasts and stews symbolised the beginning of the Christmas season; and it is this centrality he tried to capture in the song, “Piece-ah Pork.”

His country identified joyfully with the images conjured by Scrunter and that song has become one of the largest selling local songs on the Christmas market. Scrunter isn’t sure just how much sales it has done so far, but he remembers gleefully that in that year, “You couldn’t get pork nowhere to buy. The price went up to 15 dollars a pound!”

He’s done a Christmas song every year since then, following it with about a dozen to date.

His songs are all richly evocative of an atmosphere he has known and loved all his life. And while they invoke a tremendous nostalgia, they contain such an adroit humour that the listener is not yanked down into melancholy, but is elevated to the mood of celebration.

Anybody who has listened to the simple stories told in his music cannot miss the often ribald double entendre contained therein. Which of his countrymen did not also celebrate that piece of pork as a desirable constituent of various anatomies?

It comes from the mischievous sense of humour so evident in his impish grin and his salacious eyes – which, even on this morning after a night of hunting his beloved manicou (a rodent), manage to maintain a clearness that is remarkable.

Scrunter is himself an acute observer. From his childhood days, roving about in the bush of Sangre Grande and the forest of Vega de Oropouche, observing the flora and the fauna, stalking creatures, listening to the sounds of the wild; he has a highly developed sense of observation.

Coupled with his passion for life and his gusto for adventure, his imagination enlivens every thought upon which it flutters.

He lights up as he recalls his sensations of Christmas. “Children bussing bamboo! We used to cut bamboo for so, and all now so we bussing bamboo everywhere. Not any more. Now they only bussing bamboo for Divali (the Hindu festival of lights),” he says.

“We used to sing all kinds of Christmas carols,” he recalls. “And that breeze! The air itself used to be different. Your mother would be sewing curtains, and you could smell varnish and paint. And all them cake and bread they would be putting into the big, dirt ovens outside would make your belly grumble.”

Scrunter’s allure comes not just from the images his lyrics conjure, but from his wonderful village voice. It has the remarkable quality of sounding as if it has been soaked in plenty bush rum, and maybe it has; but its rough dryness serves to present that notion of community in its entirety.

It is particularly evident in the black cake quality of his Christmas songs which have brought him great success. Part of the anticipation of the season is finding out what new offering Scrunter has.

“Trinidadians brand you very easily,” he says with a laugh, “now I am the Christmas man.”