Lift the Road March ban on non-nationals

In that year, Short Shirt from Antigua was making waves in Trinidad with Tourist Leggo from the album Ghetto Vibes. Several steelbands had selected it as their tune of choice for Panorama and it became a crowd favourite at all the fetes.

What was the reaction from officialdom and those who control the festival? The Calypsonians Association, the precursor of Trinbago Unified Calypsonians’ Organisation (TUCO), then led by Gibraltar, lobbied to have Short Shirt debarred from both the Calypso Monarch and Road March competitions on the grounds that he was a non-national.

The Carnival Development Committee (the forerunner of the National Carnival Commission) then adopted that as a criterion for both competitions.

It automatically excluded not only calypsonians like Arrow (Montserrat) but also Tobago-born Lord Nelson who had taken up US citizenship (dual citizenship had not yet become an option), having lived in New York for years. The rule meant that such “foreigners,” despite singing in the tents, could never win anything in Trinidad other than popularity.

There was an outcry by younger calypsonians and the general public who found the “new rule,” particularly re the Road March, unfair.

After all, Trinidadian calypsonians had always been eligible to compete in the Road March race in Antigua and other carnivals up the islands.

Lord Nelson was deeply hurt by the new rule since his tune La La in 1976 was a close second to Kitchener’s Flag Woman in the Road March race of that year. He was hoping that the follow-up, Ah Ha, in 1977 would do the trick. At the “Clash of the Giants” (between Sparrow’s Original Young Brigade and Kitchener’s Calypso Revue, a staple fixture on the Monday before Carnival) Nelson couldn’t even appear so distraught was he. The year before he received encore after encore for La La which was a late release.

In revisiting the rule as regards foreigners as TUCO has promised to do in the year ahead, I would like to urge the organisation to revise the rule on the Road March competition.

The rule on the Calypso Monarch can stay but if the Road March is a gauge of the most popular calypso of the season, it should be open to all regardless of nationality. In doing so TUCO would finally reverse the obvious injustice done to Short Shirt, Nelson and countless others for the past 40 years.

MIGUEL BROWN via email