Voice of Guyana International

Keith Smith – Trinidad Express          

Conclusion
Wrongly, many people believe that “Jean and Dinah” was the first calypso Sparrow ever sung on stage but in 1955 he had sung “High Cost of Living”: 

“The high cost of living
Higher than a mountain
People like me and you so
Just have to stand and watch the
goods at Hi-Lo”
That year, too, he had sung “Race Track”:
“These horses always on the track
Every night they have the
Savannah pack
Indian thoroughbred and even
Chiney
Does form a line in the Savannah
every night
Waiting for jockeys to ride until
morning light
Ah tell yuh
Race gone, Rosie in front leading
Jean on the outside, Joan on the
railing
Ah hold the rein and try to pull back
But was too much ah speed down
the muddy track.”

Both these songs, of course, presaged two calypso genres that Sparrow was to dominate in the years ahead-Social Commentary and Double Entendre-but the audience could hardly have been primed for that given the introduction he received from the master-of-ceremonies in the tent located at St Vincent Street:

“It have a little feller in the back here who say he could sing. Ah go put him on. If yuh like him, clap, if you don’t like him you know what to do.”

“What kind of introduction was that? I went out there,” Sparrow told me “with my knees shaking. People might have thought I was dancing but it was my knees which were knocking. My left knee had a mind of its own. But I went out there and weathered the storm.”

At the end of that debut season Sparrow went abroad for the first time. Now there are two countries associated in the public mind with the Mighty Sparrow-Grenada where he was born and Trinidad and Tobago which has been his country since he was 18 months old. There ought to be a third.

“What Guyana did for me is something that most people have never considered… In addition the place was so big that you were able to perform every night or every other night for long periods. Suppose, for example, you had a calypsonian showing signs of brilliance now. Normally it would take him, say, two to three years to develop. But in my case one season in Guyana, working that kind of marathon-style, meant that I came out of Guyana with a tremendous amount of practice.

Over the years I have wondered if and how what Stalin calls “dis kaiso ting” would have gone had two men made different decisions. The first man was Jean Antoni, manager of what was then Salvatori and Scott and the second was the Mighty Sparrow himself. The story unfolds:

Small Island Pride had a song on the airwaves about the Hi-Lo supermarket chain:

“Hey gyul yuh looking nice fuh so
Wey yuh buy yuh meat, she say Hi-
Lo
Can I get a little piece of that she
say no
Hi-Lo don’t credit so.”

Poor Sparrow decided that he should get into the act by making a commercial, totally unaware that one had to be commissioned by some firm to do said commercial. The phrase “Salvatori, Scott and Company” . . . “Salvatori, Scott and Company”… “Salvatori, Scott and Company” kept hammering in his brain and he put this together:

“Jean and Dinah
Rosita and Clementina
Came to me one morning
After they completed their shop-
ping
They told me honey
I never had more luxury
More than when I stop
And went to Salvatori to shop.”

Day after day, Sparrow would go to Salvatori and Scott trying to sell the song but that store was doing excellent business and its management did not see the need for a new commercial. In the end the manager, Jean Antoni, tired, perhaps, of being harassed by this young calypsonian, took him to the cashier with the instruction that he be given two dollars. Sparrow took the two dollars and went his way but the song kept haunting him.

Fatefully, he decided to change the lyrics, giving birth to the “Jean and Dinah” that we know.

Along with “Jean and Dinah,” however, Sparrow had a song, “Female Sweepstake Vendor,” all about her having a series ending in “P” which was why the sweepstake was so wet and which he had since described as a “series of little jokes,” but really a “poor attempt” at the humorous calypso that the late great Spoiler had made his own. Everybody was copying Spoiler but as Sparrow put it “such was the wit and imagination of the man that he was really an impossible act to follow.”

Still there was a decision to be made. Which of the songs to sing for the competition?

“I said to myself: Sing-the ‘Sweepstake’ song and you bound to lose. If, however, the people happen to be in the right frame of mind I could “ketch” them with ‘Yankees Gone’ because quite simply it was me.

“I can see it as if it is happening now. I got up there the night and I started to sing, the crowd, man, the crowd. From the first verse the stands were in an uproar. That appreciation I told you I am always looking for. The March of Dimes behind me. The mouth band. And that’s another thing. For years before I and the boys around used to have this mouth band, all of us imitating steelband sounds-the tenors, the cellos, the bass, the iron, so that’s where I got my voice training, making my voice do anything. I am not saying that is the best way to train your voice, of course, but, out of necessity that’s how I got mine.”

As we began by saying all this was 50 years ago. Next week, Ash Wednesday, “Jean and Dinah” the play opens at the Little Carib, Woodbrook. Written by Tony Hall the play picks up the lives of both Jean and Dinah in the aftermath of Sparrow’s calypso. It was last seen in Trinidad and Tobago all of seven years ago even as it picked up notable reviews abroad. I didn’t see it then but this time I will be damned if I don’t go to find out how the lives of Jean and Dinah turned out when the Yankees went.

Tagged: Guyana