West Indies Blues: an historical overview 1920s-1950s — blues and music from the English-speaking West Indies

Abstract

Press of Mississippi, 2006, pp.187-263 she had collected in New York City from a Trinidadian migrant named Charles Penny -‗Little girl, Mama Glau, and Hummingbird'.10 The concentration of black West Indian migrants in U.S. conurbations is highlighted in Reid's survey of the characteristics of this group.Thus, in 1930, ‗there were 91,677 foreign-born Negroes residing in urban areas, 93 per cent of the total foreign-born Negro population,' the leading settlements being Boston, Cambridge, New York and Miami.11 Pinpointed by Gilbert Osofsky, the most important of these locations was New York City where, during the 1920s, ‗there were ten times as many foreignborn Negroes ... as in any other urban area' and in the same period ‗about 25 per cent of Harlem's population was foreign born.' 12 Writing in 1928, Wallace Thurman pointed to the difficulty that followed this influx, noting how ‗the Negro from the British West Indies…creates and has to face a disagreeable problem.Being the second largest Negro Group in Harlem, and being less susceptible to American manners and customs than others, he is frowned upon and berated by the American Negro.' 13 This friction was to be reflected in local black music. EntertainersAs this metropolis was a prime centre for musical and theatrical activity, it was inevitable that some West Indian entertainers would try their luck with the city's wider audience.A prototype for success was the famous black vaudeville singer-comedian Bert Williams.Although his minstrel-show training was U.S. based, he was born in Nassau, New Providence Island, Bahamas in 1874, but migrated with his family to Riverside, California, in 1885.14 During the 1920s, Trinidadians were in the forefront of black entertainers who moved to the United States from the British West Indies.They were undoubtedly encouraged by the success of Lovey's Trinidad String Band, which had toured the country in 1912, making records in New York City for both the Victor Talking Machine Company and Columbia Phonograph Company.Representatives of the Victor organisation visited the island in 1914 to record local music, including calypso.Leading his string band, the pianist Lionel ‗Lanky' Belasco performed numerous pieces before the recording horn.He also cut four piano solos, and his unissued versions of The Junk Man -Rag, by Lucky Roberts, and Scott Joplin's Maple Leaf Rag might be the earliest examples on gramophone record of these African-American compositions by any pianist.15 Belasco settled in New York by 1915, and for the next thirtyfive years his recording career is associated with virtually all the Trinidad entertainers who made the same migration.Lionel Belasco is a good example of a black West Indian expatriate who was a ‗professional'.His father was of Sephardic descent and his mother a Barbadian creole.Both were musical, and their son inherited this talent.16 Born circa October 1887, by the early 1900s Belasco was running a small string band in Trinidad.His 1914 string-band recordings mix dreamy Spanish-American influenced dances with occasional ‗refined' adaptations of the more down-home music of calypsonians.He was conversant also with the defiant or reflective chants of stickfighters (originating in a drum dance known as kalenda).The term calenda, or colinda, is known in Louisiana, and derives from dances performed across French-and Spanish-speaking Latin America during the slavery period.At the turn of the century, string bandssuch as those run in Mississippi by Sid Hemphill, or the Chatmon familyserved a similar function to that of Belasco's in Trinidad, some playing to both elite white audiences as well as rural black people.Belasco's unit, however, was closer in organisation and status to Armand Piron's New Orleans Orchestra (which performed at elite venues).Like Piron, he was a reading musician, in contrast with members of Lovey's Trinidad String Band, who played by ear.Island contemporaries did not replicate Belasco's early achievementshe was recorded annually by Victor from 1914 to 1920, sometimes undertaking several sessions per year, usually with American studio musicians.This lull in recording local Trinidad music may have been a result of the economic circumstances of the First World War.Statistics indicate there was no decrease in the flow of West Indian migrants in this period; indeed, by 1917 they were almost certainly welcomed as extra labor for the American war effort. Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement AssociationA year earlier (1916) saw the arrival in the United States of the black Jamaican political leader Marcus Garvey (1887-1940).He was one of a line of African-American people who advocated Pan-Africanism.George Liele (1750-1826) might be considered a precursor, 17 but Edward W. Blyden (born in the Danish West Indies in 1832, died 1912) was one of the most active in the late nineteenth centuryon behalf of his adopted country, Liberia.18 In the United States, Bishop Henry M. Turner (1833-1915), of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, was a similar prototype.19 The Trinidadian Henry Sylvester Williams coined the term Pan-Africanism in London, in 1900, when he held a conference on the subject in which delegates participated from three continents -Africa, the Americas and Europe.20 Garvey's message found fertile ground in the United States, and by 1920 he had established a mass movement based on his Universal Negro Improvement Association.This included the formation of a steamship company called the Black Star Line (incorporated in 1919).The rise of the U.N.I.A. took place at the same time as the advent of the creative period of black culture in New York City known as the Harlem Renaissance.With the latter in mind, it is probably no coincidence that the first popular blues cut by black performers were recorded in New York at the beginning of this decade.There were other significant black radicals from the Caribbean in Harlem who shaped the politics of this period.Some prominent in the cultural milieu include the Jamaican poet and novelist Claude McKay, P. M. H. Savory, a Guyanese physician and (from 1936) co-publisher of the Amsterdam News the principal black newspaper in New Yorkand Herbert (or Hubert) Julian, the Trinidad-born, accident-prone, parachutist and aviator, who became an official in the U.N.I.A. 21 Trinidadians Record In New York -1921It was not until 1921, a year in which Belasco did not record, that Trinidad musicians again travelled to New York to cut sides for Victor.Walter Merrick (piano) accompanied the vaudevillian Johnny Walker, whose songs were associated with recent Carnivals.Merrick's solos ranged from -Creole‖ and ‗Venezuelan' waltzes to interpretations of ‗Paseos' (or two-steps).According to Theodore van Dam, Merrick's rendering of the ‗Tobago paseo' Bulldog Don"t Bite Me (Victor 73060) is representative of Jelly Roll Morton's ‗Spanish Tinge' as well as ‗early blues and boogie woogie' piano styles.He reports also that Walker's Go "Way Gal, the ‗Trinidad Calypso' on the reverse of this record, has Merrick using ‗very much the -rolling bass‖ effects of early [Jimmy] Yancey, [Jack] Dupree, etc.' in his accompaniment.22 These observations await independent aural verification.Walter Merrick was born in St. Vincent in 1896, but moved to Trinidad at the age of five.He built a reputation as a performing musician and subsequently took up composition.He obtained a Doctorate in medicine at Howard University in Washington, D.C. and reportedly undertook postgraduate training in London and Edinburghthe latter city's prestigious medical reputation was of great importance among educated British West Indians in the inter-war period.In pursuit of a medical career, however, Merrick did not forsake all of his musical interests.23 Harry Pace, the black American entrepreneur, left the music publishing company he ran with blues composer W. C. Handy and launched Black Swan Records in January 1921.This, the first wholly owned black record company in the United States, is generally considered to be another signal for the nascent Harlem Renaissance.24 By the middle of the year Ethel Waters and Alberta Hunter were among performers on the company's roster.In October, Black Swan reported sales as far afield as the Philippines and the West Indies.25 It is not surprising therefore that early in 1922 Lionel Belasco's South American Orchestra (again, probably studio musicians) cut six sides for the company with West Indian and Latin American sales in mind. Changing Fortunes of the U.N.I.A. -19221922 was a crucial year in the fortunes of Marcus Garvey and the U.N.I.A.The success of this mass movement had created considerable opposition among some black intellectuals and concern in certain quarters of both the U.S. and British administrations.The Black Star Line had suffered numerous setbacks, owing to financial mismanagement, and eventually this was to lead to Garvey's downfall.The annual U.N.I.A. convention was less successful than in previous years and questions were raised regarding a meeting Garvey attended with Ku Klux Klan officials.Above all, his flirtation with the Klan had ‗turned some of the most influential West Indian Harlemites' against him.Until then, David Levering Lewis notes, ‗writers Claude McKay and Eric Walrond, bibliophile Arthur Schomburg, numbers king Casper Holstein, and [fellow Jamaican, the] Marxist W. A. Domingo had overlooked his excesses because of his tremendous potential for success.'On 12 January 1922, Garvey was arrested for mail fraud relating to the failed Black Star Line.Released on bail, he did not appear in court until fifteen months later, legal proceedings against him taking the best part of three years.Tried in May 1923, he was convicted on 18 June, remained in gaol until September of the same year but was released pending appeal, which was not heard until February 1925.He lost the appeal and spent two years in prison before being deported from the United

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