Calypsomania

At Manhattan's august music house, G. Schirmer Inc., do-it-yourself Calypso Kits (including bongo drums, a gourd and a pair of maracas) were selling briskly last week for $24.50 and up. Columbia Records has announced an album of calypso songs especially styled for children. Obscure pop singers are desperately shaking their hips and broadening their A's in the rush to learn calypso. And Hollywood is considering a dozen calypso films, including Calypso Grips So, and (taking advantage of the best of two possible worlds) Bop Girl Goes Calypso.

Clearly calypso is the biggest thing in the pop-music business since rock 'n' roll started rolling, but why is something of a mystery. Few people can "dance calypso" (there is no formal style) or sing it in the shower. In Trinidad, its place of origin, it was sung extemporaneously, first by plantation workers and later by semiprofessionals with such exotic names as the Growler, Attila the Hun and the Lord Executor. The lyrics might relate some back-fence gossip, reflect on the paternity of a neighbor or comment on political news. In Trinidad some of the semipros still sing, mostly for rum, at public concerts in "Tents" (often palm-thatched bamboo shacks). In the U.S. there have been previous calypso flurries, including Rum and Coca-Cola in 1945, but the real boom was drummed in by Folk Singer Harry Belafonte, whose current album, Calypso, is one of the biggest selling LPs in RCA Victor history. In a velvety voice he sings Day 0 and Jamaica Farewell. (They are not really calypso, but no one seems to care.)

Lord Flea. Columbia Records' answer to Victor's Belafonte (who still outsells the rest of the field) is Terry Gilkyson, son of a Pennsylvania insurance executive, who teamed up five years ago with ex-Truck Driver Richard Dehr and sometime Real-Estate Man Frank Miller to form a trio called The Easy Riders. They have sold more than half a million copies of a ditty called Marianne, long familiar to Caribbean tourists. Although this version's heroine is a sweet girl whom even "little children" love, her origins show through the bowdlerized lyrics:

All day, all night

Marianne

Down by the seaside

Sifting sand .. .

Financially, American imitators are doing better than such authentic calypso singers as the Duke of Iron, or Lord Flea and His Calypsonians (Lord Fish Ray, Count Spoon, et a/.), whose cleaned-up version of the nocturnal wanderings of a flea (The Naughty Little Flea; Capitol) is also a nightclub favorite. All told, calypso records account for roughly a quarter of current pop sales.

In the wake of the record boom has come a spate of new calypso nightclubs, or old nightclubs in calypso dress, most of them in the East. In upper Manhattan a saloonkeeper from County Cork recently had his ceiling strung with fishnet, his mirrors adorned with palm fronds, and proudly announced the conversion of the back room into the Ekim Calypso Dock. Mid-Manhattan's Le Cupidon closed down when calypso became popular, re-draped itself in hammock and palms and reopened two months ago as a calypso club with a Bahamian trio, two steel drummers. It has since added a converted blues singer named Anne English, now "Lady English," and two Harlem hat-check girls turned dancers. Oldest (eight months) calypso cave is Third Avenue's Jamaican Room, where the Virgin Islands' Carl McCleverty packs them in nightly with calypso in close to its pristine bawdy state.

King Radio. Already complaints are heard that U.S. calypso with its own topical allusions (e.g., "Don't blame Elvis for wiggling his pelvis," and "Happy Ireland has this to say: De Valera is here to stay") is corrupting a fine old tradition, just as oldtime jazz lovers thought big-band, arranged jazz was a sad decline from the old, improvised New Orleans roughhouse. In fact, few of the current U.S. calypso performers could compete with King Radio, a little one-eyed Trinidadian who is fondly remembered for his pithy self-portrait:

They can't find a lover like me again.

I'm the only lover in Port-of-Spain.

Fifty women now supporting me

And all of them belong to high society.

I even got a boy to tend the phone

In case you should ring me up at home.

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