Caught My Eye and Ear: Calypso Photos and Recordings, 1946-1947

Last week while looking for images to go with a blog post mentioning Shakespeare’s “Macbeth,” I stumbled across pictures of another Macbeth, “Macbeth the Great.” This was the performing sobriquet of Patrick MacDonald, a Calypso singer active in New York City in the 1940s. In some of the photos, which are part of the William P. Gottlieb collection at the Library of Congress Music Division, Macbeth the Great appears with fellow calypsonians Duke of Iron (Cecil Anderson) and Lord Invader (Rupert Grant).

I was immediately intrigued by these photos because of their connections to a collection item at the American Folklife Center. In December 1946, Alan Lomax produced a concert featuring Calypso music from Trinidad, with these same three headliners, and the Center has a recording of the whole show. As we’ll see, these aren’t photos of the same show, but it’s nonetheless fascinating to have relevant visuals to go with a classic set of recordings in the archive.

These collections shed light on an interesting time in American music, before the emergence of rock and roll, when calypso and related Caribbean styles were vying for popularity with other folk music genres. In 1944, the Andrews Sisters had a major hit with Lord Invader’s “Rum and Coca-Cola.” In 1956, Harry Belafonte’s “Calypso” became the first million-selling LP record. During the period between those milestones, it looked possible that calypso could emerge to be one of the leading styles of American pop music. Performers like Houdini, Duke of Iron, Macbeth, and Lord Invader engaged in friendly competitions like the ones documented by Gottlieb and Lomax, using witty lyrics, catchy music, and personal charisma to fascinate audiences on stage and on record.

Much of the information we have about these photos comes from crowdsourcing. When the Library of Congress acquired the Gottlieb collection, we didn’t know who the performers were or even where and when the photos were taken. All we knew is that they were taken between 1938 and 1948 and seemed to show a calypso concert with several charismatic lead singers. So we put them up on the Library of Congress Flickr page back in 2010, and Flickr users contributed suggestions about them, which Library curators then followed up on.

After Flickr users had identified most of the singers, several people suggested they might be photos of the 1946 Lomax concert. Sadly, some details didn’t add up: in particular, Wilmoth Houdini is featured prominently in the photos, but doesn’t seem to have been at the Town Hall show. Soon, other Flickr users suggested a more likely concert event: a July 1947 calypso contest held at the famed Renaissance Ballroom in Harlem.

This last suggestion made a lot of sense to our colleagues in the Music Division. For one thing, Gottlieb didn’t generally document calypso. He was, however, one of the era’s preeminent jazz photographers, and the Renaissance Ballroom did feature many jazz nights. (Gottlieb’s other calypso photos, featuring Josephine Premice, were likewise taken at a well known jazz venue, in that case the Village Vanguard.) In addition, contemporary news reports confirm that this combination of singers performed at the Renaissance Ballroom that night.

The background to Lomax’s 1946 concert series was itself interesting: Lomax found out that New York’s famed venue Town Hall could be rented at a deep discount late at night, since those hours didn’t interfere with its regular run of shows. Lomax dreamed up a midnight concert series sponsored by the People’s Songs Collective. It was called “The Midnight Special,” and each concert had a theme, including “Blues At Midnight,” “Ballads At Midnight,” and, yes, “Calypso At Midnight.”

The story of the recordings is even more fascinating. In the days before tape recordings, it was quite a hassle to record a whole two-hour concert onto discs. Each disc side held approximately five minutes of music, which meant a disc had to be flipped or taken off the turntable every five minutes, or 24 times in two hours. Because of this, Lomax didn’t bother to record most of the concerts in the series, but for some reason he did arrange for the calypso concert to be recorded. Sadly, he then lost track of the discs for over 50 years. In the 1990s, however, Alan’s sister Bess Lomax Hawes found the discs in her closet as she prepared to move! The discs were dutifully added to Alan Lomax’s collection, which was then owned by the Association for Cultural Equity (ACE). The American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress acquired this collection in 2004, as the Alan Lomax Collection (AFC 2004/004). This brought the “Calypso At Midnight” recordings into the American Folklife Center’s archive.

In 1999, before the Library of Congress acquired ACE’s Lomax collection, ACE arranged for the concert to be released on two CDs on the Rounder Records label, with notes by Steve Shapiro, Donald R. Hill, and John H. Cowley. Research for the CDs failed to turn up any photos of the concert. Moreover, they didn’t find any photos they could use of the principal singers together, either. It’s therefore a pleasant surprise to stumble across these excellent photos by Gottlieb, which include shots of the three singers, as well as clarinetist Gregory Felix, who also performed at Lomax’s concert.

It’s an even greater joy to let you know that the entire “Calypso at Midnight” concert is online for listening at ACE’s website. Although the original discs and other documentation are here at the Library of Congress, ACE still administers the rights and manages the Lomax Digital Archive. Because they also coordinated the research behind the CDs, they are able to include notes on each song from the CD booklets.

It’s always fun when collections can shed light on one another, as these two collections do. If you’ve ever listened to the “Calypso at Midnight” concert recordings and wondered what the singers looked like at the time, Gottlieb’s photos help answer that question. If, on the other hand, you’ve seen Gottlieb’s striking photos but had never heard the singers, now’s your chance to hear them in a similar context.

Look again at the photo above, featuring Duke of Iron (Cecil Anderson), Lord Invader (Rupert Grant), and Macbeth the Great (Patrick MacDonald), the three principal singers of Alan Lomax’s 1946 “Calypso at Midnight” concert recordings. I recommend you take these three friends’ advice and enjoy the “Calypso Invasion.” Follow this link to find the “Calypso at Midnight” concert!

More Links

• Find all 73 audio items Lomax tagged as “calypso” at this link.
• Find the William P. Gottlieb Collection at this link.
• Information about the “Calypso at Midnight” concert recordings might be hidden away in the Bess Lomax Hawes collection.
• The “Working for the Yankee Dollar” blog has information about this period of calypso history.
• The Library of Congress asked professor Judith E. Smith to write this pdf essay about Harry Belafonte’s “Calypso” when it was inducted into the National Recording Registry.