CALYPSO ON FILM
Sunday Express
Section 2
March 5, 2000
Pages 32 & 33
Ray Funk, the Alaskan judge who spends his spare time researching
the history of the calypso, both here and in the US, is back in town.
Funk
has for the last several years been ferreting out early film and television
appearances of calypso singers. Here
for Carnival and to work with recording company Rituals Ltd, Funk will deliver
a lecture/demonstration of his research on Thursday 9th, 5 p.m. at
Veni Mange.
Among
the rare clips Funk will show are two "soundies" made in 1941 of Sam
Manning and his ensemble.
"Soundies were an early attempt at MTV," he explains. "These were film clips made for film
jukeboxes located in restaurants and bars in the Forties. Hundreds of soundies were made but these are
the only two known of calypso."
The
soundies also feature the first filmed appearance of Trinidad dance legend
Beryl McBurnie with a couple of other members of her troupe.
Funk
will show three different film cuts of Lancelot Pinard, the great Trinidadian
actor and calypsonian known as Sir Lancelot, who appeared in a great number of
films over a film career that lasted almost 20 years.
He
sang calypso in many of those films and on Thursday he will be seen in the
classic horror film, I Walked with the Zombie, its sequel, Zombies
on Broadway and a later low budget science fiction film, The
Unknown Terror.
"The
first calypsonian I met was Sir Lancelot and I wanted to see him perform,"
explains Funk. "He was retired so
I cold only do so on film. I began
searching for them and that got me interested in calypsonians who acted in
films."
From
an obscure television program in the early 1950s in the United States, You
Asked For It, comes Calypso Joe and Coco Tee, to offer the American
audience a strange explanation of just what calypso is. Calypso Joe, Bill Matons was first known as
the Calypso Kid who would dance to accompany calypso singers in New York City.
He
eventually opened a calypso nightclub in Honolulu in the late 1950s. he and his partner had a popular calypso
night club act in Las Vegas for awhile in 1957 being fed information on all the
VIPs in the audience and doing an extempo on them.
Harry
Belafonte's success with his million-selling calypso album gave rise to a
widespread calypso craze in the United States.
Three feature films to take advantage of the craze were made. In a scene from Bop Girl Goes Calypso,
the Jamaican calypso singer known as Lord Flea performs Kitchener's early
classic celebration of bebop, "Saxophone".
Both
Kitchener and Lord Flea were in New York at the time, playing with Geoffrey
Holder's revue, Caribbean Festival.
Calypso
was also featured on several American TV shows at the time. A Disneyland Calypso segment from the
Mickey Mouse Club is one of the stranger uses of calypso. Later, as part of the Folk Movement of the
early-1960s, Lord Superior appeared on a television show called From the Bitter
End.
With
these clips, Funk will discuss the history of the use of calypso in films and
the various clips that he is still searching for. This first lecture demonstration will hopefully become an annual
presentation on different aspects of his research.
The
presentation is free, open to the public, and presented by Rituals Ltd.