50 Bill

Bill Trotman is not a comedian “in joke.” A perusal of his resume which gives an insight into the man who celebrates 50 years in “show-business,” will have you in “stitches.” Under the category for religion he stated “godly” and for trade he stated: “electrician, tailor, shoemaker, cook and lover.” “I am a boss cook,” he stressed, pointing to the first page of volume 1, of his CV. At age 70, he boasted of good health too, and was offering to give a demonstration of how energetic he felt. He celebrated his birthday on January 25. Bill, “a name not on my birth paper, they just used to call me that home”, was in mixed spirits when we met at his Morvant home for a chat. He had just arrived home from dropping his son, Darryl Durham (entertainer Double D), off in Belmont. Darryl had been discharged after spending a week at hospital recuperating from a car accident.

How was Darryl? “He better than me. I looked at his X-rays and they show nothing wrong with him. After the accident his whole right side couldn’t move for a while. Maybe it was stress at the time but that is gone. There was no physical damage, no cuts, no bruises, no broken bones. He is ready and rearing to go and that doesn’t surprise me because I am just like that, I never let anything deter me from what I want,” Bill said. His somewhat grim tone changed. “I am very elated. My son has decided to celebrate me with a record he produced with both of us singing on it called ‘Celebrate’!” Bill exclaimed. He had to furnish me with a few lines — “50 years I’m in soca, me and meh son here together/ We celebrating all over, we plan to do it forever/ Don’t bother to ask me age, Double D and me on stage/ Put yuh hand in the sky, and what is the cry/ Everybody come on give me a bligh.”

Fifty years, 50 songs and counting and 12 album recordings — Bill smiled. He had so much to celebrate. “Yes, I feel I have accomplished a lot. I have done so much that I feel there’s hardly much I can do still. I’ve been in movies (the 60s film America By Night and the 80’s Men of Gray: Flight of the Ibis), performed at Carnegie Hall (NY), been on television, radio, the biggest places in the world, soap opera in Canada, do sculptures...” But wait a minute! Bill, while chatting, was penning words to a song he calls the reverse of his 70s all-time favourite song “Back to School.” (Of course there was lots still for him to do!) Written through the eyes of a school child, the gist of the chorus was “mammy mammy I DON’T want to go back to school,” he explained, because of “recent reports of violence in school.”

So, he’s still composing, teaching art for the past four years at the Maximum Security Prison, Arouca on a voluntary basis, and making preparations to host another of his art exhibitions in June. He added: “I want to release another album with all my super hits. (The first album — Trinidad Bill Golden Hitz of Calypso and Soca Vol 1 — was released in 2003.) I want to write another book (a follow-up to The Search of Bill Trotman, book of poems) and I’m hoping to record some songs I’ve written and just stored.” He also plans to make an appearance at the Soca Monarch competition as well as a few fetes. “It’s a soca something.” He has stopped recording his music for the past two years “because of the pirates. That is why David Rudder quit too, but he just found that out. If I put out a record for $42,000 and can’t make $2,000, it doesn’t make sense. A hit is when you make money, not when everybody like it and nobody buying it.”

He sat up in his chair as he pondered my question: “Where he thought calypso was heading?” He answered: “The youths in calypso are keeping it alive, that doh mean it going anywhere. Especially if they make a headway, they (eventually) branch off. They win the junior calypso, sing for a little while and switch. The youths are not coming forward in calypso, they coming forward in soca.” We were interrupted by the telephone, on three occasions. After answering the last call, Bill returned to the living room with an addition to his attire. He was wearing a transparent ear piece in his right ear. “You see,” he explained, “I used to play steelpan and after all those years the music killed the drum in my ear. Yuh ain’t see every time I have to come closer to hear yuh.” We reflected on his family a bit. He shared his sense of humour with his mother, Marion Trotman, who was a seamstress. “My mother was a humorous person. My father, Cecil Trotman, was a singer and dancer. When he died the newspaper said that he was the number one tenor singer in the country. My mother was always entertaining guests with her jokes. Morvant was a hell of a place to talk ole talk, so their’s and her’s put