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Dogs, we have heard from since the Rock of Ages was a pebble, are man’s best friend. On the evidence Bobby and I have accumulated, it would seem they get along pretty well with calypsonians too.
I think it’s a safe bet that if there were a part of the human body called a dog, there’d be a larger number of calypsoes in which man’s best friend is featured.
Of course, there are numerous instances where dogs get mentioned. But featured?
(via Vecteezy.)
Take for instance Dan is the Man in the Van. Sparrow ends that classic thus: They beat me like a dog to learn dat in school / If mih head was bright / ah woulda be a damn fool.
Would even a desperate man dare claim that that kaiso is about a dog? No more likely, surely, Bobby is quick to point out, than someone claiming that Shadow’s What is Life is about the worm (that) end up eating he.
Felines, we’ve already noted, are headline acts in several Sparrow calypsoes. These include Ah fraid Pussy bite Me, which Birdie used to transform into a veritable one-act play during live performances. But even Bobby, a Kitchener lover if ever there was one, could find only one Grandmaster title featuring a canine: Dog Bite Yuh.
He does not remember ever seeing, he said, a live performance of the late 1970s standard. But, he reluctantly conceded, it was unlikely that Kitch would have set the stage on fire as he had surprisingly contrived to do in 1975, when he won his only Calypso Monarch Crown with Fever—and Tribute to Spree Simon.
(via TNT Island.)
Although not a prude, Bobby does vividly remember having a very embarrassing experience during a concert in the Grand Stand in the Oughts.
“She was aided and abetted by a sweating, half-naked fellah wearing a three-quarter pants and nothing else,” he told me, as he recounted sitting stiffly beside his then teenage daughters and staring straight ahead while a certain female calypsonian performed her runaway hit, Doggie.
Doggie, coincidentally, was also the original title of the 1998 Anslem Douglas hit eventually titled Who Let the Dogs Out.
Douglas would probably not approve of his song being included here. According to an interview he published on his website, the song had nothing at all to do with dogs.
It was, he asserted, “a man-bashing song” with “a feminist theme critical of men who catcall women”.
Singing Francine belonged to an earlier era when it was still rare to have public acknowledgement of the existence of the problem of domestic violence, essentially husbands who beat their wives.
The message of Francine’s memorable Run Away was crystal clear: Dog does run away, cyat does run away, woman, fowl does run away when man treating them bad (…) / What happen to you? Woman, you could run away too!
The unforgettable chorus of Valentino’s Barking Dogs dates from more or less that same era: Hark, hark, the dogs do bark, the thieves are coming to town / Thieves in rags and thieves in tags / and some thieves in their dressing gowns.
In vain might you search for a Valentino website that provides a code. But some, I suggested, looking presumably through red lenses, see in those lyrics a prediction about the yellow 1995, 2010 and 2025 Bas and KPB administrations. For me, that gives Valentino too much credit.
Bobby baulked, not wanting to go there.
“We talking politics or we talking animals in kaiso?” he asked me pointedly.
Me: “We cyar do both?”
Bobby: “Name one Valentino calypso with a animal in it…”
Me: “You got me there.”
Bobby: “So let’s talk instead about a calypsonian who has made a major statement on animals in kaiso…”
Me: “Major statement? Like George Orwell in Animal Farm: all animals are equal but some calypso animals are more equal than others? Machel? Music Farm?”
Bobby: “No, Ass! In 2007 or 2009, Chalkdust sang a calypso called What to Do with the Savannah. Know it?”
Me: “Nope! I won’t remember too much ah Chalkie’s stuff after Calypso Sick in the Hospital, which was 1993, I think. Only the ones he win with: In Town too Long in 2005, the Heart—with an E!—thing in 2009, the Arithmetic foolishness in 2017…”
Bobby: “Well, it exists. In it, he recommends that Prime Minister Patrick Manning lock up: calypsonians who singing ’bout snake and sow, / butterfly, donkey, dog and cow.
“But later in the same song, he recommends that Manning erect a statue of him at the Grand Stand so tomorrow’s children will know what a great calypsonian he was. This, mind you, is the same man who sang Three Blind Mice, Let the Jackass Sing and The Scape Fox.”
Me: “Ah! You think he doesn’t approve of people singing bout animals, cyat and dawg and pig and donkey?”
Bobby: “Sounds so to me. Daiz Kitchener and Sparrow and Invader and Terror and Roaring Lion and Blakie and Shadow and Francine and Penguin and and and and…”
Me: “Iwer George? (Loud laughter) I think maybe we need a lil nuance here. If you stop and look at the three titles you just identified, you’ll see that what seems like animals isn’t really animals. The ‘mice’ are three Caribbean leaders whom Chalkie himself dismisses as ‘jackasses’. ‘Mice’ could also be the three PNM deputy political leaders. The ‘jackass’ is the calypsonian himself and the ‘fox’ is Randy Burroughs.
“So I don’t think Chalkie is attacking Shadow (Snakes in the Balisier), Smiley (Housewife) or Popo (Snake in de bag). No more than he has it in for Funny (Farmer Brown), Valentino (Barking Dogs) or even King Solomon (Miss Santa). Don’t you think he might just be making the case for calypsonians to do more with animals songs than merely mention them?”
Bobby: “Hmmm. I see what you mean. At the end of Lying Excuses, for example, Sparrow’s bee merely bite mih on mih behind. Kitch, though, takes the simple buzzing of a single bee or perhaps a hive of bees and makes a timeless, ‘beautiful melody’. The same way he takes the sound of humble tin pans coming down the Dry River in East Port-of-Spain on a rainy day and converts that into the melodious Mystery Band. Sheer genius!”
Me: “Exactly! Scrunter too made Crapaud Revolution out of nothing, some crapaud croaking. Pooganatinipoong. That’s not easy. And other singers like United Sisters and Ronnie McIntosh used animals, donkeys, to make decent dance tunes.
“But we should go back to Chalkie, examine his individual contribution in 2026. Aloes and Cro Cro too. And Gypsy…”
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Columns that say that, after Covid has done its worst, we’re grateful
to be still here and be able to get out of bed early to heed the poet’s
Carpe diem injunction and, savouring all the day’s blessings, mine
those banal, random, ordinary, routine, unspectacular, run-of-the-mill,
early-morning thoughts and conversations we often engage in.
