Caribbean Music In The United Kingdom
Large-scale Caribbean migration to England began in 1948. The Empire Windrush carried almost 500 passengers from Jamaica, including Lord Kitchener, a calypso singer from Trinidad. By chance, a local newsreel company filmed him singing "London Is The Place For Me" as he got off the ship. In 2002, London Is The Place For Me: Trinidadian Calypso, 1950-1956 was finally released in Britain. The 1951 Festival of Britain brought the Trinidad All Steel Percussion Orchestra (TAPSO) and Roaring Lion to public attention. The smart set in Oxford and Cambridge adopted both calypso and steelband for debutante parties. In 1959, Trinidadian Claudia Jones started the Notting Hill Carnival. They brought Mighty Sparrow and others directly from Trinidad. Edric Connor had arrived in England from Trinidad in 1944. He starred in a West End musical called "Calypso" in 1948. A white Danish duo, Nina & Frederik, recorded several calypsos from 1958 to 1962, scoring in the charts. Cy Grant (from Guyana) sang a song by Lord Kitchener in the TV drama A Man From the Sun in 1956. It told the story of Caribbean migrants. From 1957 to 1960, Grant sang calypsos on the BBC TV news programme Tonight. In 1962. English comedian Bernard Cribbins had a hit with "Gossip Calypso".
Read more about Caribbean Music In The United Kingdom: Reggae and Ska, Roots and Dub, "Punky Reggae Party", Lovers Rock, White Reggae, Mixed-race Reggae, 2-Tone, Gospel, Folk Music
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“It is a curious thing to be a woman in the Caribbean after you have been a woman in these United States.”
—Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)
“We often love to think now of the life of men on beaches,—at least in midsummer, when the weather is serene; their sunny lives on the sand, amid the beach-grass and bayberries, their companion a cow, their wealth a jag of driftwood or a few beach plums, and their music the surf and the peep of the beech-bird.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“It is a united will, not mere walls, which makes a fort.”
—Chinese proverb.
“It is easier to govern a kingdom than to rule a family.”
—Chinese proverb.