Calypso

  • Song of the Charmer

    Lame DogCalypso

    The dog is back — with a professionally designed logo.   We’ll mark the occasion by considering the musical legacy of Louis Eugene Walcott, a calypso singer of the 1950’s who was known as “The Charmer” or “Calypso Gene.”

    Walcott, the son of Caribbean immigrants, was born in 1933 in the Bronx and raised in Roxberry, Massachusetts.  As a boy, he loved listening to Jewish cantors.  Indeed, in an interview with Henry Louis Gates, he recalled that, after taking up the violin “all my heroes were Jewish,” especially Jascha Heifetz.  He also speculated that his Jamaican-born father, who he seldom saw, was of Sephardic ancestry.
     
    Walcott aspired to attend Juilliard, but instead went to Winston-Salem Teachers College on a track scholarship. Rather than become a teacher, however, he began touring, singing in clubs, and releasing records.  While obviously far less successful, some have compared him to the young Harry Belafonte. He recorded covers of calypso standards including the “Ugly Woman” song (discussed in our 12/4/17 post). He also wrote original compositions.
     

    The most interesting of Walcott’s songs is probably this one about Christine Jorgensen, the first American to undergo sex reassignment surgery.  While offensive by contemporary standards, it endures as a historical curiosity.

    In 1955, Walcott abandoned his career as a musician. But five years later, he released a new record that was played from loudspeakers and sold at rallies in Harlem. It illustrates a dramatic change in his world view and preoccupations. Here is an excerpt:

    Today, Walcott is better known as

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  • The Case for Ugly — From Roaring Lion to Rory Block

    Lame DogCalypso, R & B

    What’s the number one compliment paid to women in popular music?  I suspect that it boils down to “you look beautiful.”  The appeal of a pleasing physical appearance is so visceral that its value is ordinarily taken for granted.  Only on rare occasions will a song champion the opposite.  Can you think of any examples?

    Among the most familiar is “If You Want to Be Happy” — a 1963 hit for James McCleese  a/k/a “Jimmy Soul.”  It famously asserts:
    If you want to be happy for the rest of your life
    Never make a pretty woman your wife.
    So from my personal point of view
    Get an ugly girl to marry you.
     A pretty woman makes her husband look small
    And very often causes his downfall.
    As soon as he marries her, then she starts
    To do the things that will break his heart. 

    The song is credited to Joseph Royster, Carmella Guida, and Frank Guida.  But in fact, it’s a revised version of a 1934 release by  a singer/songwriter known as Roaring Lion.  Here is the original.

     
    The true author is a figure of sufficient interest to merit a detour.  Roaring Lion was Rafael de Leon  (not to be confused with the Spanish lyricist of that name — give or take an accent mark — who was also born in February, 1908).  An illegitimate child from the hill country of northern Trinidad, he spent time in orphanages before being adopted by an Indian Muslim family.  After winning various calypso competitions, he was invited to record in New York, where he had the honor of performing for President Roosevelt.  He had a prolific career in the ’30’s and ’40’s, a highlight of which was writing the calypso standard “Marianne” (who is “down by the seaside … sifting sand”).  In 1951, he went to England where, contrary to his own advice, he married a Norwegian woman who was not at all ugly.  Sadly, as an interracial couple, they were repeatedly subject to racist attacks.  In the 1960’s, de Leon returned, along with his family, to Trinidad, where he was honored for his cultural contributions.  In later years, he wrote a controversial book maintaining that calypso derived, not from African roots, but from the music of medieval French troubadours.  Over sixty years after his  “Ugly Woman,” song, he released his final album.  He died at the age of 91 in 1999.
     
    If de Leon made the case for choosing an aesthetically challenged woman, what about a similarly situated man?   For that, let’s turn to one of the Dog’s personal favorites, blues queen Rory Block.  Her main point in this 1984 recording seems to be that handsome men are narcissistic assholes.

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