No water in de brandy

Walter Ferguson’s ‘Pure’ Kaiso from Costa Rica

By Geoffrey Dunn
Special to Jouvay

            A LIITLE MORE THAN a year ago, a friend of mine living in Costa Rica, “Senator” John McCuen, sent me a pair of albums by “an old calypsonian” named Walter “Gavitt” Ferguson, from the small village of Cahuita on the Caribbean Coast, south of Port Limón.
            McCuen, a bookshop owner and book publisher in San José, had also visited Port-of-Spain and was familiar with the roots and traditions of Trinidadian calypso. I had also sent him an early rough-cut of our film Calypso Dreams, so he was no novice when it came to the art form. He insisted the music of Ferguson was vintage kaiso.
            Nonetheless, I was skeptical of the package when it arrived. I assumed the music must be in Spanish and had strong doubts that it could sound and feel anything like true kaiso, or that it had any direct lineage to the Trinidadian art form. Busy with the final edits of Calypso Dreams, I let it sit on my shelf for a couple months.
            When I finally cracked open the two CD’s, Babylon and Dr. Bombodee, wonderfully produced and beautifully packaged by Papaya Music out of Costa Rica, I was astonished by what I heard. The opening song of Ferguson’s first recorded album (he is now 86 years old, two years senior than Trinidad’s Mighty Terror) was titled “Callaloo” and sung in an English patois that sounded surprisingly Trinidadian.
           
            I know a woman she name was Lou
            She wake up one morning all black and blue
            She called her sister, name was Sue
            Beg her to cook up some callaloo
            Me say callaloo….
            Everybody love callaloo.

            Moreover, the rhythm and rhyme scheme of the music (and more importantly, its evocative sensibility) sounded very much like vintage kaiso, though from a much earlier era, from the teens and early 1920s — more like Houdini’s “Caroline” or Lionel Belasco’s “Bajan Girl” (both of which are included on the fantastic three-record set Calypso: Best of Trinidad – 1912-1952).
            Listening to Ferguson was like going back in time. I had spent the last five years filming old-time calypso throughout Trinidad for Calypso Dreams, mostly in an acoustic setting, and Ferguson’s material was remarkably rootsy, vital and vibrant. His voice was rich in the tradition of Lord Pretender and the Mighty Terror, and there was a sly and whimsical nature to his lyrics that were delightfully refreshing.
             Ferguson would have felt right at home, I thought, with the likes of the late Pretender, Bomber, Stryker and Terror (and they with him), though in certain respects his calypso roots stretched back even farther than theirs.
            How could this happen, I pondered: vintage kaiso in the middle of a Spanish speaking country, 2,500 kilometers from Trinidad and on the far western rim of the Caribbean?
            When Lord Superior, a 50-year veteran of the Calypso scene, visited with me in California in the summer of 2005, I cautiously played him the CD’s. He too was astounded.“Kaiso! Kaiso!,” he remarked. “He sounds like de Old Brigade and before.” Supie’s confirmation was good enough for me.
            Another song on Babylon, “Cabin in de Wata,” has a clever playful edge to it, including masking and double entendre, elements that once were a staple of traditional Trinidadian kaiso, but missing from most contemporary calypso today.
           
            The building was quite erect
            Imagine it, floating in de sea
            The lady called him an architect
            But you’re gon’ take it down immediately
           
            INEED, AS I WAS to discover over the past year, the Limónese Province of Costa Rica, on the country’s southeastern Caribbean coast, is a bastion of English-speaking, Afro-Caribbean culture.

The first African slaves were imported to Costa Rica in the 16th Century, but they soon absorbed the culture and language of their colonial Spanish masters.
            The second great wave of Afro-rooted immigration to Costa Rica came in the early decades of the 20th Century, when workers came mostly from Jamaica, but also from Trinidad and Barbados, to complete the construction of the trans-Costa Rican railroad that would link the capital of San José with Port Limón on the Caribbean coast, and later they would work for the imperial United Fruit Company, growing and transporting bananas.
            Unlike most immigrant groups in the world migrations of the 20th Century, the Afro-Limonene have remained isolated from the dominant Spanish-speaking culture of Costa Rica (and of Spanish-speaking Central America) and have held on fiercely to their English-Creole language and traditions.
            During the ‘20s and ‘30s (and even into the ‘50s and ‘60s) calypso singers from Jamaica and Trinidad journeyed to Limón, playing traditional Trindiadian calypso. Trinidadian calypsos were also the favorite songs on Limóenese radio stations. Communities gathered around record players to listen to some of the earliest calypso music recorded. The Limonese stage their Trinidadian-styled Carnival every year in October, with calypso competitions and mas.
            Indeed, as ethnomusicologist Anita Herzfeld has noted, calypso is one of the primary cultural expressions by which the Afro-Limonese identify themselves as a community.
            It was during this early era of Trinidadian migrations to Limón that Walter Ferguson (he also goes by the sobriquet “Segundo”) first became influenced by the works of Houdini (his favorite calypsonian of his youth), Invader, King Radio, Atilla the Hun and Lord Beginner — and later by Lord  Kitchener and the Mighty Sparrow (the latter his favorite contemporary calypsonian, though he finds some of his music too risqué).
            One of the defining factors of Limónese isolation is that their musicians were also far removed from the varied influences (soca, reggae, soul, blues, samba, rock’n’roll, etc.) that have influenced and altered traditional Trinidadian calypso, so that in certain aspects, Costa Rican calypso remains closer to its roots.
            This is not uncommon in cultural transformation. It has long been recognized, in the words of linguist James Watt Raine, that the English spoken in isolated pockets of Appalachia (in the backwoods of the US) "is more closely akin to Elizabethan English than any other dialect spoken today." The oldest Italian dialects (those of my family, for instance, near Genoa) are spoken not in Italy, but in isolated communities on the west coast of the United States and in Australia. The pure language survives in isolation.
            This cultural purity of Ferguson’s calypsos and other Costa Rican calypsonians (some of whom were recorded on a much earlier CD compilation Calypsos: Afro-Limonese Music of Costa Rica -- Lyrichord: 1970) contrasts strikingly with the exportation of calypso to the United States after World War II (dubbed the Calypso Craze) and which is featured in the excellent traveling exhibition, Calypso Music in Postwar America, currently traveling internationall, with a stopover this season at the Clico Gallery, Edward Street, Port-of-Spain.
            As Clico curator Sonja Dumas has noted, in the US, the calypso tradition was culturally diluted: It was portrayed as “dynamic, sensual fun rather than as a complex artistic tradition.” I would argue that was done primarily for commercial purposes and economic exploitation; in contrast, the Limonese calypsos pay homage to the cultural complexities.
            You would never hear the likes of a Walter Ferguson in he US during the so-called Calypso Craze. He is his own man and doesn’t bow to the master dollar.
            The great calypsonian and calypso scholar, Dr. Hollis Liverpool (Chalkdust), noted about Harry Belafonte’s role in the Calypso Craze in an interview for Calypso Dreams: “Belafonte put plenty water in de brandy.”
            The Limonese calypso of Walter Ferguson has no water in the brandy. It is the real ting, only perhaps, it is a brandy seasoned and cured in casks made of different wood than those of Trinidadian calypso. They are first-cousins, I would argue, unlike the bastard children of those who corrupted and commercialized calypso in the US during the aftermath of the Second World War. And as such, it provides an interesting counterpoint to the current traveling calypso exhibit.
            As in Trinidad, however, Costa Rican calypso is also being challenged and, in certain respects, transformed by other musical traditions and influences. As Yasmín Ross notes eloquently in the liner notes to Dr. Bombodee: “The calypsonian figure depicted by Ferguson is vanishing: The character with more woes than glory as he travels through artistic environments…the guy without a dime, the loser who has given up on romance because women get bored with him or take him for everything he’s worth.”
            In “Going to Boccas” on Dr. Bombodee, Ferguson sings forlornly:

            The young gal claim that
            She don’t want me no more
            Then I notice she start to
            Dash me tings out a door
            She says she goin’ to a foreign land
            She goin’ to kill de calypsonian…
            I goin’ to buy a pass
            Packing up me tings and go to Bocas.

            FOR WALTER “GAVITT” FERGUSON, these cultural intricacies mean little to him these days. He knows what music he likes and he likes what he sings.
            When I visited with him in the spring of 2006 in his family’s stopover hotel in  the small village of Cahuita, he told me that he had “started to sing before I was six years old.” He explained to me that his musical education – first playing the harmonica, then clarinet, ukulele, guitar and banjo —  began early on, and that he began performing in his teens.
            He remembers the calypso music of Trinidad from his earliest childhood. His love, he told me, “has always been calypso.”
            Ferguson continued to play small gigs at local clubs and parties and dance halls throughout his adulthood, recording only a few songs until 2002, when he was rediscovered, and his career rejuvenated, by Papaya Records. The two remarkable albums were recorded in a makeshift studio, in his family’s hotel, with bed mattresses and rugs to baffle the sounds of pet parrots and barking dogs.
           

With his eyesight going bad now Ferguson’s not sure if he’ll record anymore. “Oh, I can’t play much with de bad eyes,” he said to me. “But I have enough material for two more albums. I don’t know if they’ll ever get made. I guess time will tell.” *

Dr. Geoffrey Dunn is an award-winning filmmaker, writer, journalist and professor based in the United States. He is the producer and director (with Michael Horne) of Calypso Dreams and teaches Film and Digital Media and Community Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. To order records from Papaya Music, go to their web site: www.papayamusic.com.