Creole Music Of The French West Indies A Discography 1900-1959

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It would seem that a Creole woman from Cayenne, capital of French

Guiana, was the first to provide recorded examples of the French Cre-

ole language (including a folktale and a song), on a series of linguis-

tic cylinders made by French anthropologist Dr. Léon Azoulay for the

Musée Phonographique de la Société d’Anthropologie during the Ex-

position Universelle, Paris, 1900. The earliest flat disc recordings,

however, appear to date to August 1914, when the Victor Talking Ma-

chine Company organised a special trip to Trinidad in the then British

West Indies ‘to make a complete repertoire of Trinidad’s “local” music

including “Calypsos,” “Paseo’s,” [

sic

] Spanish waltzes, Two Steps, Pat-

ois and East Indian songs by local performers;’

and it is likely that

the ‘Calypsos’ and ‘Patois’ songs they obtained during their Septem-

ber recording sessions were the first commercial recordings of

French-Creole vocal music made in the West Indies.

The Calypsos comprised four ‘Single Tone’ and two ‘Double Tone’ ex-

amples of the genre – (sung in English and French Creole) by J. res-

igna (or Iron Duke) — Henry Julian, the respected turn of the century

bandleader and songster, whose White rose masquerade band had

dominated the early twentieth-century Carnivals in Port-of-Spain. The

Single Tone Calipsos

(note the alternative spelling) had four lines in

each verse and were sung originally in French Creole, while

Double

Tone Calipsos

, with eight line verses and the first line repeated in the

opening section, were performed in English. At least one of the

Single

Tone Calipso

recordings

Belle Marie Coolie

(Victor 67035) entered the

Martinique corpus. Victor recorded two ‘Patois’ songs, or rather

‘Na-

tive Trinidad Kalendas’

— stick-fighting songs, with accompaniment by

tamboo-bamboo stamping tubes — sung in French Creole by Jules

Sims:

Ou Belle Philomene

(Victor 67033) and

Bagai Sala Que Pocheray Moin

(Victor 67377). During the same sessions, the bandleader and pianist

Lionel Belasco and his orchestra committed

to wax numerous Spanish Waltzes and

Trinidad Paseos, many of which were never

issued commercially. Caribbean distribution

of these records was probably limited by the

advent of the First World War, although Be-

lasco’s later releases became well known

throughout the region.

Beginning in 1924 the anthropologist Elsie

Clews Parsons undertook the first of several

expeditions to the Caribbean collecting folk

tales and associated music using a wax cylin-

der recording machine. Commencing in Trinidad, where she learnt

French Creole, she obtained 37 examples in that language, in a total

of 58 of the island’s tales printed in the first of her three-volume an-

thology

Folklore Of The Antilles, French And English.

Travelling north she

probably visited Grenada and Carriacou before reaching St. Lucia, gar-

nering tales in French Creole and English in each island. From the lat-

ter territory she travelled to Martinique where she obtained 95

French Creole tales and variants. Here she stayed in Morne rouge, the

home of the majority of her 27 informants, although several were

from Lorrain (Grand Anse) and one or two from Saint-Pierre and Fort-

de-France. A proportion of these selections probably represent the

first sound recordings of French-Creole vernacular traditions in the

island but, alas, all Parsons’ cylinders are reported to have been de-

stroyed and no inventory has been traced. In 1925, Parsons continued

her collecting in Guadeloupe where from a greater number of loca-

tions and contributors (37) she obtained 138 tales, with variants. Her

progress in this year was to islands northwards. Among other terri-

tories she visited during 1926-7 were the small French islands of

Marie Galante and Les Saintes. Parsons’ three volumes of Antillean

folklore published in New York City by the American Folklore Society,

respectively in 1933, 1936 and 1943, comprise the first comparative

presentation of the region’s folktales. With limited distribution, how-

ever, the books remain an underused resource.

Following the conclusion of the First World War, commercial manu-

facturers of gramophone records often arranged for performers to

travel to urban centres to contribute their selections of distant mu-

sical styles — Paris, France; London, Britain; and New York City, U.S.A.

— are metropoles featured in this discography. In the 1920s, for the

British West Indies, New York City served as the base where domi-

ciled Trinidadians recorded their local

music for sale to migrant communities and

for export. A parallel pattern for the man-

ufacture of vernacular recordings marketed

to the French West Indies was established

in Paris in 1929. This followed a 1926

French Creole linguistic sampling obtained

by the Archives de la Parole of the Univer-

sity of Paris preserved as a 78-rpm pressing

specially manufactured by the Pathé Com-

pany. It was, however, the October 1929 ses-

sion for Odéon by ‘L’Orchestre antillais,

direction: M. Stellio’ that established com-

FOREWORD

A Note On Methodology