Historicist: Sounds of Home I
In the 1950s, Toronto’s black population was small and the West Indian population smaller still, kept that way by Canada’s exclusionary immigration policies. As a first step in integrating into a new, unfamiliar country, new arrivals first worked to achieve their basic needs including securing employment and adequate housing. But nearly as important in the adjustment to a new country were opportunities to socialize and reconnect with the culture from home, like calypso music.
While aspects of Caribbean music flavoured the North American mainstream culture as pop culture fads from time to time, the relatively isolated West Indian community—who weren’t concentrated in any single residential neighbourhood—remained cultural outsiders with relatively few opportunities to engage with the music and culture on their own terms. A decade before the creation of Caribana, West Indian immigrants were already seeking similar ways of transplanting “cultural expressive forms,” in the words of researcher Annemarie Gallaugher, that helped “to shift the focus of home from strictly ‘there’ to include ‘here’ as well.”
Calypso singer Lord Caresser visits diners at the Rockhead’s nightclub in Montreal, April 28, 1951. Photo by Louis Jaques in Weekend Magazine from the Library and Archives Canada.
By the late 1950s, Toronto had long enjoyed at least occasional exposure to calypso music and Caribbean culture. From the 1930s to the 40s, Caribbean culture had occasionally popped into the mainstream consciousness with brief island-inspired dance and music fads, with calypso covers by pop vocalists like the Andrews Sisters. Lord Caresser (aka Rufus Callender), a Trinidadian calypso singer, proved to be so popular in the Montreal nightclub scene of the 1940s and 1950s he earned a weekly CBC radio program with a national and international audience.
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