Word: calypso
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...some of the crummiest "philosophy" ever scraped out of the bottom of a cracker barrel. There is the stool pigeon who is efficiently murdered by his fellow convicts; and the steady old hand (Charles Bickford) who grimly joins the rebels when his parole is canceled. The one comparative novelty-Calypso Singer Sir Lancelot, improvising verses about the prisoners-seems like stale...
...trouble with the law was Trinidad's "King of Calypso," Edgar Leon St.-Clair (Stone Cold Dead in the Market). He was picked up in Brooklyn for failing to report to probation authorities (he has been required to report periodically ever since he opened his common-law wife with a can-opener back...
Stone Cold Dead is the biggest Calypso hit since Rum & Coca-Cola (TIME, Jan. 29, 1945). It is also the first big success of 45-year-old Wilmoth Houdini, a Brooklyn-born Trinidad Negro who lives in Manhattan's Harlem half the year, the other half in Trinidad. Houdini, who has recorded 800 Calypso songs, expects to make $40,000 from...
Wilmoth Houdini (real name: Edgar Leon St.-Clair) calls himself King of Calypso, a title sought after by rivals with such imposing titles as The Lord Executor, The Lord Invader (Rum & Coca-Cola), The Senior Inventor, King Radio, Attila the Hun, The Growler and The Caresser. All of them are old hands at dashing off musical comments on world affairs and local scandals, in Latin-African rhythms as insistent as radio commercials, and in the oddly distorted British accent of the British West Indies...
Houdini claims to have won every Calypso "war" since 1920. The Calypso Carnival held on the two days before Ash Wednesday is now a major tourist attraction in Port-of-Spain, with each of the rival kings setting up headquarters in bamboo tents, and challenging each other to sing-downs composed on the spur of the moment...