Calypsonians are today still being ostracised in the land of their origin, T&T. Willard Harris, known in the calypso fraternity as Lord Relator, is convinced of this unhealthy situation which first cropped up during the early days of the steelband and calypso. The 66-year-old bard, who has won the National Calypso Monarch, Buy Local Calypso titles, and not forgetting the Auntie Kay Children’s crown, feels this ostracism is as a result of a deficiency in our society.
Willard also has some not so pleasant views on the news media’s treatment of calypsonians.
Q: Mr Harris, you apparently have been keeping a very low profile for several years now, why?
A: (A quick response in the living room of his Malick/Barataria, home on Thursday morning) That is because of the media and the way in which they operate…
Wait! Wait! Pull up selector! Why you attacking me so early…hold on nah.
I am not attacking you, I am attacking the media. Let me finish what I am saying, and you wouldn’t have a problem. I have justification for what I am saying. If you are not in the calypso competition they have nothing to do with you…you are not being covered by the mainstream media.
Yes, but do you blame the media for that?
Alright. Ok. (Pensively) But they are so one-track in their thinking that everything is about Carnival. If anything is happening out of Carnival, it doesn’t count for them. It is a lifelong problem that we have with calypso and Carnival.
Wouldn’t you blame it on the system?
That is what I mean…That is what I mean...
Not the media?
So the media is not part of the system, according to you.
You concede then that it is not the media?
Ok. (A tinge of sarcasm) Alright, the media is not part of the system according to you...I concede.
The media blanked you over the years?
It is not that they blanked me...that is how narrow-minded they are. The calypso competition is for Carnival, and people just resign to the fact that if you are not involved in Carnival you are not involved in calypso.
Could it be said that you are partly to be blamed because years ago you opted out of the Calypso Monarch competition?
(A slight pause with a deep sigh) Yes. Since 1985 I made a conscious decision that I not going to be a part of the competition and moreso the calypso tent. From that time, I did solo concerts, and the first one at the then named Holiday Inn...Nostalgia.
I did 135 radio and television commercials which was my upkeep from then and now, so that it was not that I wasn’t doing anything, that is only through the media eyes…they only focus on covering Carnival, and if you are not in it you are not going to get covered. But I have been working non-stop. I left the calypso tent and have been all over the world. If I give you my resume (he retrieves a file which contained his resume), you will be able to take from that and build on the article you are going to write.
I repeat, your absence from the calypso tent was of your own making?
Of course. That was a conscious decision I made, and I have no regret whatsoever. I am not dead, I surviving, that is the system under which we live. Since 1985 I never stopped working as a professional artiste or performer. So the coverage coming from the media doesn’t bother me because it doesn’t starve me.
I must confess I am a calypso fan. Don’t you miss the traditional calypso as we know it in the tents? When last you went to a calypso tent…this year, last year, two years ago?
There are only ten or 12 people in the calypso tents right now!
Patrons?
Patrons. Nobody going to the tents again, right? And if you think I lie, you could ask Cro Cro, you could ask Sugar Aloes.
Eh Eh, don’t mention nothing about Cro Cro to me, please.
Alright. OK. Ah sorry, ah sorry about that...
In other words, you are trying to tell me that I must narrow back myself to go into a tent to sing to ten people and I am not sure I would even get a salary? In 1985 my salary was $3,000 a week at Spetakula and I saw it coming, I foresaw it coming.
Relator, even though there are many bright young people singing calypso in its purity, do you really think the art is dying?
(Crossing his legs) The way things are being done now, the traditional calypsonians are being sidelined…they are being marginalised (raised voice) and that is because of the change in the music…the Montanos, the Garlins doing a thing that is getting the crowds...Soca Monarch…
There is a hidden group who purposely do not want calypso to go anywhere and they’re stifling it so the people who have something substantial to say they push them aside, which is living proof of what I am saying.
And that group is?
I am taking the Fifth Amendment on that one, Clevon.
People in our generation are saying ‘we don’t understand what them young people saying, you know? I prefer the old time calypso.’ So to answer your question if calypso is dying, it is yes and it is no.
No?
Because of the unfortunate circumstance in which it has found itself in today, marginalisation and sidelining the people who have something to say.
Yes?
Because people like you who are craving for it and people like me who are still doing it with all the blows I get…everywhere I go I singing vintage calypso from way back since 1913 right through the ages. That’s why it is not dying. And as long as I am alive, it would not die.
About one week ago, Mr Harris, we met in Curepe. I left my seat and greeted you, at which point you berated me for ‘snubbing’ you about five years ago in a high-end restaurant where you were performing at a birthday function and I did not speak to you then. Do your really believe, Relator, that I had deliberately refused to acknowledge you at that time?
Perhaps you did it unconsciously and after I blow up on you last week, I realised ‘de fella was not conscious about what he was doing’, and it happens all the time. And it is a natural thing…
At that meeting last week, you said something which I found to be extremely disturbing in this day and age, that calypsonians were being ostracised?
Yes and marginalised…it never stopped from the Sparrow era when he sang Outcast. (Relator sang a chorus from that number) Look at that photograph taken 60 years ago on the wall there (pointing to a family portrait including himself as a six-year-old child), everybody in that picture turned to out to be a professional of one kind or the other. I was the only one who took up entertainment as my career.
So if you wanted to be a panman or a calypsonian, you were labelled as having no ambition whatsoever. I chose entertainment so I was the “wutless” one in the family (laughs).
Mr Harris, do you honestly believe that calypsonians are still being ostracised in 2014?
From that regard, yes. Because we make our contribution to the development of our beloved country. They are the people who tell you what time of the day it is, so to speak, from the poets, the writers, calypsonians, prophets in their own rights.
Look at this classic of Crazy, In Time to Come, where he predicted the coming of America’s first black president and Sat Maharaj would have a black grandchild...
Sat Maharaj has a black grandson?
Ask Crazy (bursts out laughing).
If this ostracising talk is real, what can be done to erase that perception of yours?
I wouldn’t have the answer to that one, it is something we have lived with from time immemorial and it is a cultural thing, a societal deficiency, and they are now trying to correct it by stripping apart the education system that we have had because it has failed us.
Now they are looking to sport and film, they are moving from pure academic to those areas which, in my view, is part of the move to diversify the economy because it is known we cannot depend on the energy sector indefinitely as our financial saviour.
Relator, what has been the high point in your professional career?
Apart from winning the Calypso Monarch in 1980, singing with a 40-piece philharmonic orchestrate in Cologne, Germany, four years ago.
Lowest point?
There was no low point. The people disgraced themselves when they threw toilet paper at me at the calypso semi-finals at Skinner Park, the same year that Claude Noel won an international boxing title.
Finally Relator, do you plan ever going back into the calypso tent?
Never. Never. When a chicken comes out of an egg does he go back into that shell?
