Introduction
The songwriter, arranger, musician and producer Van Dyke Parks is today best known for two contributions to modern American popular music: on the one hand, his work on the celebrated Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys recording, Smile, commenced and then abandoned in 1966–1967, ultimately re-recorded and released to widespread acclaim in 2004; on the other hand, his own debut solo album, Song Cycle, greeted with critical appreciation (though less rapid sales) in 1968 and still occasionally cited as a psychedelic musical masterpiece. Both Smile and Song Cycle deserve attention as ambitious, inventive, serious and delightful explorations of popular music's aesthetic, intellectual and technological potentials. However, these achievements should not overshadow Parks' next musical initiative. For between 1971 and 1975 he recorded a body of work (two solo albums, two productions) which also rewards further study: a sustained exploration of the relationship – musical, cultural, social, economic and political – between the United States and its Caribbean neighbours, Trinidad and Tobago in particular. A pioneering investigation of world music pursued well before Paul Simon and Ry Cooder made their more high-profile contributions (indeed, well before the concept of ‘world music’ was coined), Parks' forgotten Caribbean work not only invites a revision of established world music chronologies; it also provides a test case for a range of analytical frameworks often applied to the study of popular music, and identifies the limits of some of them, cultural imperialism in particular.
Each of the stopping-off points in Parks' Caribbean voyage offered fresh perspectives on little-known or long-forgotten backwaters of American popular music; together they enabled Parks to survey key features – now inspirational, now hazardous – of a trans-national, musical new found land. Production of the Esso Trinidad Steel Band's self-titled Warner Bros. Records album in 1971 saw Parks exploring one musical embodiment of Trinidadian identity and independence; co-production of the Mighty Sparrow's Hot and Sweet album in 1974 allowed him to add the island's calypso traditions to his mapping. In between these two recordings, Parks' second solo release, Discover America (1972), extended the scope and nature of his circum-Caribbean navigations. Featuring cover versions of regional songs reaching back to the Great Depression and beyond, the album in geographical terms explored locations ranging from mainland Louisiana, via the Gulf coast and Mexico, to the islands of Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago. Generically, it traversed a variety of new world musical landscapes, its stopping-off points echoing not only calypso and steel band but also funk, soul and r'n'b, mariachi and reggae, and ‘the open-hearted sentimentality of Old Hollywood’ (Fitzgerald and Hayward Reference Fitzgerald, Hayward and Hayward1999, p. 147). His follow-up solo work, Clang of the Yankee Reaper (1975), re-viewed many of these geographical and cultural contours from new angles. Less glossy magazine tourist than self-defined (and un-credentialed) participant-observer anthropologist, Parks on this album continued to celebrate the region's creative resources, yet he also highlighted its increasingly dangerous waters and exposed headlands.
These recordings not only constituted a contribution to ‘world music’, broadly understood, long before the category itself had been invented or its now-canonical recordings released; from a critical point of view they also enabled – and continue to invite – an application of many of the theories and concepts whereby popular music has been understood and contextualised. As creative works, cultural expressions, and corporate commodities, moreover, these albums particularly encourage readings that draw into dialogue analyses across a range of scholarly disciplines, from cultural studies via musicology to political economy and social history. As such, they offer rich opportunities for those seeking to develop further interdisciplinary aspects of popular music studies.
Caribbean prospects
The growth of calypso and steel band, the musical forms for which the former British possession of Trinidad and Tobago remains best known, is closely linked to its historical experience. More specifically, the promotion of these genres to quasi-official status has long been associated with the islands' quest for and achievement of independence from imperial rule, a development underwritten by nationalist ideologies, synonymous with political and economic progress, and congruent with the displacement during the twentieth century of Great Britain by the United States as the dominant regional power in the Caribbean. While calypso and steel band are both home-grown forms of musical expression, therefore, it is perhaps not surprising that their rise has in part been informed by and indebted to Uncle Sam's presence, power and influence (Brown Reference Brown1990, pp. 89, 93, 95–6).
During the pivotal decades of depression and war, for example, calypso, the grass-roots musical ‘living newspaper’ which had been repeatedly censored and banned by the colonial authorities in Port-of-Spain, enjoyed a surge of popularity in the United States which in turn bolstered its status at home. From 1934 onwards Trinidadian calypso artists travelled to New York both to perform and record; on the basis of successful appearances at New York night clubs, some found themselves invited to sing on nation-wide radio, and even to feature in Hollywood movies. Partly as a result, after 1937 US-based record companies began making annual recording trips to Trinidad in search of new talent to bolster a recording industry that was still struggling badly in the depression (Hill Reference Hill1972, pp. 56, 67; Brown Reference Brown1990, p. 90; Rohlehr Reference Rohlehr1990, pp. 77–9, 86; Liverpool Reference Liverpool1994, pp. 186–7; Hill Reference Hill, Allen and Wilcken1998, pp. 74–92). The coming of World War Two gave this nascent ‘calypso boom’ (as Time magazine phrased it in 1938) a further boost. With the music's homeland now vital to the war effort as both a strategic naval base and a source of oil, American servicemen first occupied the island and then flooded, off-duty, into its ‘calypso tents’. Visiting American entertainers subsequently took songs they heard there back with them to the mainland. One sign of the growing popularity of calypso in the United States came in 1944 when the Andrews Sisters' cover version of Rupert Grant's (Lord Invader's) ‘Rum and Coca Cola’, picked up by touring American entertainer Morey Amsterdam, topped the Billboard singles charts (Rohlehr Reference Rohlehr1990, pp. 256, 360–2; Liverpool Reference Liverpool1994, p. 187; Neptune Reference Neptune2007, pp. 129–31, 138–48). In the mid-1950s a second American ‘calypso boom’ was triggered, this time by the popularity of Jamaican-American vocalist Harry Belafonte's ‘Banana Boat Song (Day-O)’ and ‘Jamaica Farewell’. Belafonte's 1956 Calypso album became the first long player in history to sell over a million copies and topped the Billboard album charts for thirty-one weeks (Bilby Reference Bilby, Mintz and Price1985, p. 213).
Steelband followed an analogous trajectory between the powers, if not onto the charts. Like calypso, Trinidadian drumming practices – the so-called ‘tamboo bamboo’ – had long been denigrated (and at times suppressed) by the British, associated as they were with local carnival traditions and thus with social disorder, political dissent, and the spectre of the primitive. Even as carnival itself was suspended during World War Two, however, the rudiments of the steel band were being developed behind the scenes, with local musicians starting to replace the paint cans, waste bins, biscuit tins and auto parts previously used for percussion with fifty-five gallon oil drums, which had either been discarded by the armed forces or were appropriated – and on occasion purchased – by the musicians. Between 1945, when islanders filled the streets of Port-of-Spain to celebrate V-E and V-J days and the initial results of these musicians' wartime experiments first appeared in public, and 1947, when oil drums really came to the musical fore, an association between ‘pan’ and the American presence was established. Neither calypso nor steel band were US inventions, of course; still, Washington's military forces had by accident enabled steel band to come into its own as both a melodic and rhythmic instrument, just as its market forces had by popular demand helped promote calypso. As one member of the Esso Tripoli Trinidad Steelband later said of the United States, ‘little Trinidad makes beautiful music from the drums that you throw away’ (Parks Reference Parks1971; Hill Reference Hill1972, pp. 45, 47–8, 51–2; Rohlehr Reference Rohlehr1990, pp. 354–5; Stuempfle Reference Stuempfle1995, pp. 21–7, 32–44, 53; Holton Reference Holton, Beezlet and Curcio-Nagy2000, p. 207).
In spite of these mutually beneficial interactions, such links and trajectories cannot be fully accommodated within simple new-world narratives of mutual aid, national liberation, social progress and cultural gain, with John Bull cast as imperial villain. Before the war, for example, calypsonians who aspired to succeed in the United States felt obliged to shape their subjects and arrangements to suit the tastes and preferences of American audiences, thereby gaining popularity but in the process attenuating the genre's status as Trinidadian folk expression (Brown Reference Brown1990, pp. 91, 93; Liverpool Reference Liverpool1994, pp. 186, 188). Thereafter, wartime steel band pioneers certainly risked draconian punishment for taking oil drums from local refineries owned by the British (and dogged by lamentable working conditions). But US authorities were no more tolerant of thefts from their bases (probably applying on-the-spot physical sanctions rather than the more laborious legal remedies pursued by the Crown), even if the wartime emergency sometimes obliged them to pay better wages to local workers (Neptune Reference Neptune2007, pp. 80–4). Moreover, calypsonians also resented what one of them called the ‘American social invasion’ and the impact of GIs with money on Trinidadian life, in particular their competition for the attention of island women: Lord Invader's ‘Rum and Coca Cola’ spoke in part to these unwanted side-effects of the US military presence (Rohlehr Reference Rohlehr1990, pp. 360–1, 364–9; Cowley Reference Cowley2000, pp. 4, 12–13; Neptune Reference Neptune2007, pp. 144–9, 158–67). Indeed, social, legal and commercial inequities unconnected with British rule were all highlighted by this song. Thus none of the profits from the Andrews Sisters' cover version found their way back to its Trinidadian writers, in part because the song had been falsely copyrighted in the US by Morey Amsterdam. It would take a successful plagiarism law-suit to win damages for Rupert Grant and co-writer Lionel Belasco (adding insult to injury, Amsterdam's court room defence was based on lyrical revisions which had toned down the original song's criticism of the occupation's side-effects). Similar problems later faced Fitzroy Alexander (Lord Melody), the Trinidadian composer of Belafonte's ‘Banana Boat Song’ (Nizer Reference Nizer1961, pp. 233–86; Rohlehr Reference Rohlehr1990, pp. 360–4; Holton Reference Holton, Beezlet and Curcio-Nagy2000, pp. 208–9).
If these musical occasions, innovations and trends were informed by and cast light on the economic, social, political and cultural forces shaping, for good and ill, the relationship between the United States and its Caribbean neighbour, then they also threw into relief the historical transformations it was undergoing as the heyday of empire passed. Washington's wartime military occupation was in this sense a transitional, even atypical, event, symbolic more of British dominion than American post-imperial hegemony. By the mid-1950s, most US servicemen had left Trinidad, and unlike the first American calypso boom (which had been closely linked to the occupation) the second would be underwritten in large part by a civilian army of US tourists invading via cruise ship and package holiday jet (one of whom would be a young Van Dyke Parks) (Perez, Jr. Reference Perez1975, pp. 136–43; Dudley Reference Dudley2004, pp. 27–8; Stuempfle Reference Stuempfle2004, p. 2). Economic ties would remain integral to the relationship, and here too, in one sense, the Americans would pick up the British baton: the same year Belafonte's Calypso topped the US album charts, Texan business interests purchased oil exploration leases on the island. Here too, though, the nature of the economic link was changing, for where the British had valued the local population primarily as part of the means of production, for the Americans they also had potential as consumers – not least of imported US-made movies, music, radio and television programming. That very shift went hand in glove with a third transformation, this time in local grass-roots perceptions. In part because of the manifest shortcomings of their colonial status under a Britain that was itself in decline, many Trinidadians saw Uncle Sam, his Yankee dollars, and symbolic figures like crooner Bing Crosby as embodiments of liberation, not of oppression. As calypso singer Atilla the Hun (Raymond Quevedo) explained in his 1935 Brunswick recording ‘History of Carnival’, in his own country the British (and some Trinidadians) had denounced him as a ‘vagabond and … hooligan’, whereas in New York he was treated as ‘an artist and a gentleman’ (Noblett Reference Noblett1985). Associated, in short, with democracy and prosperity, while evidently willing to extend cultural recognition to its Caribbean neighbour, the United States offered a friendship worth cultivating.
In the face of such broader transformations, it is not surprising that the problems exemplified by the ‘Rum and Coca-Cola’ case appeared secondary or transient. Since the 1930s, American recognition and appreciation of calypso had played a major part in boosting its standing in Trinidad and thereby in bolstering both the islanders' sense of their own collective identity and an incipient national pride (Brown Reference Brown1990, p. 90). During this period, too, Hollis Liverpool notes, the music had also ‘brought to the Caribbean untold benefits … in terms of foreign exchange as thousands of visitors and tourists pour[ed] into the islands annually to witness the various Carnival festivities' (Liverpool Reference Liverpool1994, p. 187). By 1957, when the US Navy set up its own steel band and calypso briefly looked set to displace indigenous rock'n’ roll from the American charts, the music from the margins seemed to have come of age internationally. Metaphorically at least, once Trinidad and Tobago finally gained independence from Great Britain in 1962, its citizens were calling their own tune – and Uncle Sam was playing along.
So too was one of his own. For at that time, the nineteen-year old Van Dyke Parks was performing with his older brother as a folk music duo in small venues along the Southern California coastal strip. When, the following year, they found themselves sharing the bill at the Insomniac in Hermosa Beach with a steel band led by distinguished Trinidadian Andrew de la Bastide, Parks' long-standing love for the island's music – which reached back to childhood family links to the Caribbean and to the influence of the two calypso booms – was rekindled. Even as he was drawn into other musical projects during the remainder of the 1960s, Parks remained a believer, convinced (as he later recalled) that if he could only ‘bring the stuff forward a re-visitation of the commercial potential of calypso music’ might see it gain the kind of profile and appreciation it warranted (Parks Reference Parks2003). How to address that challenge, while at the same time avoiding the kinds of problems previously experienced, would absorb much of Parks' energies during the first half of the 1970s. If the effort ultimately failed in marketplace terms, it did yield a series of recordings whose production and contents illuminate the circumstances – economic, social, political and cultural – of the music's creation, reception and meaning. While none topped the charts, that is, all became charts, or mappings, of the nature, potentials and limits of inter-American cultural activity.
Imperial departures: The Esso Trinidad Steel Band
Even before entering the recording studio, the circumstances under which Parks made his first attempt to ‘bring the stuff forward’ prefigured some of the issues. Thus, the Esso Trinidad Tripoli Steel Band was formed during the wartime US military occupation and took its name in part from a Hollywood movie (To the Shores of Tripoli [1942], itself a line from the US Marine hymn): both indices of the growing American influence. Moreover, the band first came to Parks' attention after appearing at the EXPO 67 world's fair in Montréal as representatives of the recently independent Trinidad and Tobago: confirmation of Britain's declining imperial sway and of steel band's status in the new nation's self-definition. As salient as these cultural and political contexts were, and emblematic of the American economic presence, the band was sponsored by (and again in part named after) a US oil company – the latter anxious about nationalisation of their properties and thus underwriting expressions of cultural independence to curry favour with the Trinidadian public and the new authorities in Port-of-Spain (Parks Reference Parks1998; Reif Reference Reif2001; Silva and Nelson Reference Silva and Nelson2003).
To what extent, if at all, these contexts and interests resonated in Parks' work with the band may be traced within and beyond the recording studio. Produced by Parks and released on Warner Bros. Records in August 1971, The Esso Trinidad Steel Band (the ‘Tripoli’ had by this time been dropped) may be read on the basis of its contents as another variation on the theme of cultural imperialism. Earlier Caribbean-American musical productions such as ‘Rum and Coca Cola’ and the ‘Banana Boat Song’ had appeared to exemplify the process – implicit in such theories though less often highlighted – whereby US interests take music away from the source, commodify it to suit the preferences of the American market, yet rarely acknowledge or adequately reward its creators. At times, they had evinced a restructuring of the music by its creators at the source (with calypsonians, for example, writing on American topics for American audiences in styles designed to appeal to American markets). Now, the inclusion on The Esso Trinidad Steel Band of three arrangements of European classical works and four contemporary Anglo-American pop tunes suggested perhaps that this Caribbean band were literally and metaphorically still playing the Great Power's tunes, not vice versa (Laing Reference Laing1986; Goodwin and Gore Reference Goodwin and Gore1990, pp. 68–72). Trinidadian black nationalists, prominent at the time, certainly felt that steel bands battling for local honour during carnival by performing arrangements of Beethoven or The Beatles were betraying the island's identity and autonomy, and similar nationalist anxieties in relation to calypso could be traced back to the US wartime occupation (Aho Reference Aho1987, p. 50; Stuempfle Reference Stuempfle1995, p. 86; Dudley Reference Dudley2002, pp. 141–3, 144–6; Neptune Reference Neptune2007, pp. 148–53).
If, as Shannon Dudley notes, carnival meant ‘inverting the normal order of things and … subjugating symbols of power and social respectability to the pleasures of the vulgar masses’, then to nationalist critics those panmen who sustained a European classical repertoire were failing to satisfy the overriding purpose and logic of carnival; the Esso Trinidad Steel Band album might well be considered a variation on that theme. Yet such criticisms implicitly called upon musicians of this small Caribbean island to close their ears to music from beyond their shores for fear of the ideological or cultural consequences on the basis of cultural imperialist notions which, once theorised, appeared short on detail and less than convincing (Roach Reference Roach1997, pp. 48–52; White Reference White2001; Tomlinson Reference Tomlinson2002, pp. 37–50). It is true, of course, that the Esso Trinidad Steel Band was as much a product of Los Angeles recording studios as of the Port-of-Spain streets. That did not mean, however, that the musicians who recorded it had been subjected even more thoroughly to American cultural hegemony. Nor, for that matter, were they necessarily resistance fighters engaged behind the lines in the ‘defilement of dominant cultural icons’ (Dudley's reading of carnival functions on an ideological rather than a musical level). Rather, on The Esso Trinidad Steel Band we hear a trans-national collection of musicians making first-world music (classical and popular) ‘serve local aesthetics and values’ by re-appropriation, not mockery, and doing so for musical more than political purposes. In the process, the band cast aside whatever ‘oppressive baggage of cultural hierarchy’ may have accompanied works by Saint Saens or Paul Simon, while retaining the classical repertoire's abiding prestige both within and beyond Trinidadian carnival circles; its members also gain musical authority, technical confidence and aesthetic pleasure by demonstrating what they and their instruments can do (Dudley Reference Dudley2002, pp. 145–8, 154).
In his own approach to production work on The Esso Trinidad Steel Band, Parks in various ways expressed a cross-cultural sensitivity towards both the musicians' needs and the contexts within which they recorded that also fits poorly within a cultural imperialist framework. Referring back to his previous exposure to steel band, and to the problematic ways in which he felt some of his fellow ‘white … kids started singing the blues’ during the early 1960s folk revival, he emphasises the care with which he approached his work on the album. As the steel band's producer, and on the basis of his many visits to Trinidad and his immersion in its musical community, his role would in part be that of an ideal anthropologist, the ‘“non-participant observer.” … I would like not to leave a footprint’ (DeWalt Reference DeWalt, DeWalt, Wayland and Bernard1998, pp. 259–99; Parks Reference Parks2003; Bernard Reference Bernard2006, pp. 343–4, 347–9). A thief, of course, might harbour the same ambition on the basis of less altruistic motives. There is no evidence, however, that Parks was stealing anything; in this sense, The Esso Trinidad Steel Band was anything but a long-playing descendant of ‘Rum and Coca Cola’. Insofar as the producer's footprints were visible, they appeared not on the album but strategically placed all around it: when immigration problems threatened the Trinidadians' presence in the United States, he worked hard to secure the H-1 visas that enabled them to work legally; when their tour bus was involved in a crash, he laboured to arrange replacement transport and played host to an injured band member for three months; when they lost their travel bags, he scared up twenty-eight toothbrushes (Parks Reference Parks2003).
Once questions of cultural independence within the recording studio were supplanted by struggles over the financial gains to be made from those who worked there, the broader contextual forces, historical trends and vested interests in relation to which Parks and the steel band worked again exercised an influence; the room for manoeuvre available to the ideal anthropologist in the studio was, however, much less evident outside it. This became disastrously clear when, as work on the album continued, Parks suddenly found himself served with a multi-million dollar law-suit by the band's own Las Vegas-based management. The essence of the suit had to do with money. ‘I was sued by the manager of the group’, he later recalled, ‘when I paid the men directly a payment commensurate with the union scale for a session they did. That's what I thought the ethical thing to do was’ (the band members, he reported, had told him that hitherto ‘they were making about ten dollars a month a man’). After what Parks recalled as ‘a lot of attorney hours, a lot of depositions’ over the next two years, the case was settled out-of-court in 1973 by the record label (Parks Reference Parks2003). Leaving aside the damage done to Parks' personal and professional life (which was considerable), the very existence of the court case itself was an index of what had – and what had not – changed in inter-American cultural relations since the days of the ‘Rum and Coca-Cola’ lawsuit. Where the latter focused on intellectual property rights and the charge Parks was subjected to involved employment contracts, what mattered here was that the steel band case ultimately pitted a major Los Angeles corporation (for whom Parks worked) against a relatively small-scale Las Vegas management company, with the band members' own financial interests – as a result of Parks' efforts – aligned with the former. If one manifestation of cultural imperialism involves first-world music performed for first-world profits by third-world musicians trucked in for the purpose, then this lawsuit involved attempts by one part of the American business system either to halt the practice, to render it more equitable, or to prevent another part of the system from cornering more than its fair (sic) share of the proceeds.
From a variety of perspectives, then, the making of The Esso Trinidad Steel Band album illuminated key aspects of US–Caribbean relations as they inched, at times with difficulty, into the post-imperial age. In diplomatic terms, that process had been foreshadowed when President Franklin Roosevelt during the 1930s and early 1940s had called upon the nation to replace its early twentieth century reliance on ‘gunboat diplomacy’ with a ‘good neighbour policy’ towards the hemisphere, and to ‘give them a share’ of the commercial proceeds (Gardner Reference Gardner1960, pp. 47–63, 109–32; Green Reference Green1971, pp. 3–84). To some Marxist and critical theorists, the latter transformation might be read in terms of a shift from absolute to relative surplus value, or of the establishment of Fordist regimes of production. To other observers, working at a more proximate level, the events and interests surrounding the album might illustrate either the progressive nature or the conservative aims of American corporate liberalism. For record producer and Caribbean music enthusiast Van Dyke Parks, at the creative cutting edge, his work with the Esso Trinidad Steel Band was primarily a contribution towards the development of a music of the Americas: at once commercially viable, aesthetically satisfying, and in all sense equitable to its pan-American creators.
Black Atlantic crossing: Discover America
Beyond the recording studios and law courts, The Esso Trinidad Steel Band won critical endorsement in the form of a short-listing for the Grammy award as best ethnic or traditional recording of 1971. By this time, though, Parks was already working on his next contribution to a music that traversed the physical, political and cultural borders of the United States. The solo album Discover America was intended by Parks in part to meet his perceived cultural and social obligations to the Esso Trinidad Steel Band and to Trinidadian music in general (he liked to cite the motto on the country's flag: ‘together we aspire, together we achieve’) (Parks Reference Parks2003). Yet in bringing together members of the steel band, Latin American and US studio musicians, and performers from LA-based rock groups such as Three Dog Night and Little Feat, the album was in personnel terms a more thoroughly pan-American exercise than its predecessor. Whereas The Esso Trinidad Steel Band had emphasised European classical works and Anglo-American pop songs, meanwhile, Discover America focused on arrangements of Trinidadian calypsos dating back to the first boom era of the 1930s and 1940s. Here too, though, the calypso arrangements and other songs on the album were themselves exercises in post- or trans-national creativity: the album featured not only steel band but also Mexican mariachi, African-American r'n'b, funk and soul, Jamaican reggae and more amongst its styles and rhythms. If Parks on this recording was no longer serving as the ideal, hands-off, anthropologist-producer, therefore, he was scarcely seeking to make circum-Caribbean sounds dance to his star-spangled baton: this next stage of his Caribbean voyage was, rather, marked by a more broad-ranging, in-depth process of trans-national cultural exchange.
In exploring new aspects of that process, Discover America traced additional contours on the inter-American cultural map. Thus whereas Parks endured what he called ‘malicious prosecution’ as the price of his commitment to union pay rates on the Esso Trinidad Steel Band recording, in making Discover America he did not risk plagiarism lawsuits, even though the latter was – as its punning title indicates – a collection of cover versions. The risk was low in part because of the distance that had not been travelled since Rupert Grant and Lionel Belasco won their ‘Rum and Coca-Cola’ court case: in seeking legal redress they had been the exception amongst Caribbean artists, most of whom (as Parks lamented at the time) still showed little concern about how copyright might affect their incomes. But if that lack of interest was in part understandable – Parks noted that ‘in the Caribbean, authors aren't … signatories to companies that make [royalty] payments’ – it also sat awkwardly, and Parks on ethical grounds responded by devoting time and energy to alerting the affected songwriters or their agents to their rights (Parks Reference Parks2003). Had Parks done so solely in his individual capacity, the action might have been morally laudable but little more. Yet he acted on behalf (and with the active support) of Warner Bros. Records. Indeed, the Discover America sleeve notes emphasised not only that all royalties due were being paid but also that any record company that failed to do so was cheating the artists. Such statements suggested, perhaps, that by the early 1970s corporate fears of legal action and/or bad publicity were dictating some minimal commitment to equity, that one part of the American music industry was indeed acting on FDR's injunction to ‘give them a share’, or that it had of its own volition added an ethical dimension to its commercial and artistic motives. (Warner's at this time was enjoying high growth rates by producing innovative, high quality and commercially successful music, while its executives had a reputation for being honourable in relation to royalty payments.) (Kibbee Reference Kibbee2003) Whichever reading applies, the making of Discover America certainly threw light on legal and ethical aspects of US–Caribbean cultural relations, and of the ways in which they had (and had not) changed.
The album's song selection, meanwhile, also illuminated the relationship in ways that the (primarily instrumental) Esso Trinidad Steel Band had been unable to do (and the Andrews Sisters' cover of ‘Rum and Coca-Cola’ had been re-written not to do). Conceiving the relationship between Trinidad and the United States in terms of hopes and anxieties, opportunities and risks, beliefs and experiences, the album tells of an asymmetrical, uneven affair, at once intimate and strained, touched by utopian aspirations yet marked by everyday limits. For those to whom Uncle Sam beckons – whether islanders in general or musicians in particular – the appeals vary. In Fitz McLean's ‘FDR in Trinidad’ the dream is of political liberation, with the US President welcomed as the agent of peace, democracy and security. In ‘Sweet Trinidad’ by Aubrey Christopher and ‘Ode to Tobago’ by Aldwyn Roberts (Lord Kitchener), material prosperity is the goal. More commonly, though, the metropolitan appeal is cultural, covers of songs like Hubert Rafael Charles's (Roaring Lion's) ‘Bing Crosby’ identifying the US entertainment profile, even more than its political or economic example, as key to the attraction. Yet such bright lights from across the water may blind unwary observers to the dangerous shoals that lie between, and while it documents the United States' multiple attractions, Discover America also charts the cultural tides that threaten to drag those seduced by them under. In Kelvin Pope's (Mighty Duke's) ‘Be Careful’, a cautionary parental homily on first love and marriage carries gendered allusions to international affairs: ‘they're nice from far but far from nice’. In ‘Jack Palance’ by Slinger Francisco (Mighty Sparrow), the double-edged nature of attractive-looking foreign relations is rehearsed via an updating of ‘Rum and Coca-Cola’ which recovers the latter's original bite while extending its metaphoric vision of trans-national predation from the sexual to the social and cultural.
Even as it locates and correlates the risks and potentials of the relationship, unfurling America's stars only to reveal their stripes, Discover America also pursues both to their respective limits. Insofar as the album entertains a transcendence of such borders, the presence of nationalist thought as an integral component of its vision might seem incongruous. Yet as Parks later recalled, in the early 1970s black nationalism had been growing in influence across the region, and on the album it is signposted accordingly (Lux Reference Lux1972; Parks Reference Parks2003). Thus if Lord Kitchener's ‘Steelband Music’ offered a relaxed, non-exclusive celebration of the homeland expressed via pride in its signature instrument, then both Derrick Harriott's Jamaican reggae song ‘John Jones’ and Kitchener's calypso ‘Your Own Comes First’ articulate a more combative, urgent, assertive nationalism, alert to overseas threats (not solely American, either) and determined to resist. At the same time, though, Discover America also maps near-utopian post-national trajectories. Allen Toussaint's New Orleans-flavoured ‘Riverboat’ invites listeners on a never-ending voyage beyond land, landfall, and (by extension) borders and the nations they describe, while the closing steel band arrangement of John Philip Souza's ‘Stars and Stripes Forever’ takes a different route to a similar destination. The treatment offered here may be (as one reviewer put it) ‘every bit as radical as [Jimi] Hendrix's destruction of the same song’ at Woodstock in 1969 (Carmody Reference Carmody1999); if so, however, it is as much recovery exercise as demolition job, lending to a comparatively rigid patriotic march what Jon Fitzgerald and Philip Hayward (Reference Fitzgerald, Hayward and Hayward1999, p. 148) call ‘a joyful, loose-limbed, up-tempo calypso feel’. Parks' treatment of the US-Caribbean relationship at Discover America's conclusion sounds, as a result, less like a jeremiad than a carnival procession-cum-revival service.
How, then, to interpret such work? The kind of cultural imperialist matrix that accommodated the ‘Rum and Coca-Cola’ case is of limited value in relation to The Esso Trinidad Steel Band, still less Discover America. But if neither propagates an imposed, star-spangled teleology, nor do they wholly embrace counter-vailing nationalist visions. Their transgressions of nationally or racially oriented templates suggest, indeed, that the kind of framework embodied in Paul Gilroy's The Black Atlantic (1992) may enable more fruitful readings of these recordings, however tenuous, even incongruous, such a prospect might appear. According to Gilroy, the social migrations and cultural interactions that were integral to the gradual elaboration of the Atlantic economy fostered, in the shadow of its racially ordered, slavery-based demands, an African diaspora or ‘black Atlantic world’ – a community, at once virtual and real, which was less oriented towards nation-states or specific locations than marked by conditions of transience, displacement and uncertainty. In the process, these exchanges also spawned a closely related ‘trans-cultural, international formation’ of ideas, practices and expression: a ‘counterculture of modernity’, so named because it was every bit as modern as the systems of production and exchange it challenged. Marked on the one hand by a normative ‘politics of fulfilment’ which believed in the eventual realisation of ‘the social and political promise that present society has left unaccomplished’, Gilroy's black Atlantic counterculture embraced on the other a utopian ‘politics of transfiguration’ devoted to ‘the emergence of qualitatively new desires, social relations, and modes of association’. As a result, Gilroy argues, its correlations of race and culture were less than hermetic. Not least via the ‘consistently overlooked’ medium of music, the black Atlantic counterculture anticipated ‘new … social relations’ – ‘within the racial community’ but also ‘between that group and its erstwhile oppressors’ (Gilroy Reference Gilroy1993, pp. 3, 7, 19, 32, 30–1, 35–8; Chude-Sokei Reference Chude-Sokei1996, p. 743).
These openings towards trans-national, multi-racial formations invite a reading of Parks' Caribbean ventures as a latter-day pursuit of precisely that social and cultural imaginary. Thus songs on Discover America like ‘FDR in Trinidad’ lyrically articulate key normative traits of the counterculture of modernity: expectations of political, economic and cultural fulfilment to ‘be grasped through what is said, shouted, screamed or sung’. The counterculture's utopian aspirations may also be traced across the recording. ‘Because words … will never be enough to communicate its unsayable claims to truth’, however, the quest for transfiguration is necessarily expressed in ‘more deliberately opaque’, non-discursive fashion. ‘An enhanced mode of communication beyond the petty power of words’ – the music itself – is required, Gilroy argues, ‘magically [to] ma[ke] audible … the formation of a community’ free from alienation and want. This ‘basic desire to conjure up and enact … new modes of friendship, happiness, and solidarity’ devoid of racial prejudice, nationalist division, and other alienating aspects of modernity, may be precisely what is expressed in a song like the instrumental ‘Stars and Stripes Forever’ (Gilroy Reference Gilroy1993, pp. 32, 37–8).
The company of minstrels: Hot and Sweet
Van Dyke Parks' next major project, the production of Hot and Sweet (1974) by distinguished calypsonian Slinger Francisco (Mighty Sparrow), carried him some distance, geographically and otherwise, from the last stop on Discover America. It also followed a different course from his previous Caribbean production. For whereas The Esso Trinidad Steel Band had been disturbed by turf wars beyond the studio relating to the economic and legal contexts within which recording took place, production work on Hot and Sweet (carried out at Criterion Studios in Miami, Florida, in mid-1972) was marked – metaphorically and almost literally – by social and ideological tensions between musicians and producers. While Sparrow himself had in previous years supported the Trinidadian People's National Movement and its leader, Prime Minister Eric Williams (whose program valued political and economic independence while encouraging foreign trade and investment), some of his band members were by this time influenced by the more radical, combative strands of Black Power thought (Regis 1990, pp. 1–9, 29–33, 46–7, 52–4, 150–1); between them, at any rate, they appear to have fuelled conflicts within the studio over various aspects of the production process: at one point, Parks' co-producer Andy Wickham only narrowly avoided becoming the victim of a cutlass assault by one of the principals (Lux Reference Lux1972, pp. 213–16; Rohlehr Reference Rohlehr1985, pp. 2–4, 7; Brown Reference Brown1990, p. 97; Regis Reference Regis1999, 86–99; Wickham Reference Wickham2004; Manuel, Bilby and Largey Reference Manuel, Bilby and Largey2006, pp. 225–7). Yet if such events gave all too vivid expression (from a Trinidadian perspective) to the limits and shortcomings of the good neighbourly, ‘give them a share’ ethos, it was a remark made by Sparrow in greeting Parks at Miami Airport en route to the studio – ‘Hi, Larry’ – that, as Parks himself later observed, offered a perspective on the recording which in retrospect invites further consideration.
According to Parks, Sparrow was pretending to confuse him with Hollywood star Larry Parks. Since the actor was best known for playing the protagonist in The Jolson Story (1946), and Al Jolson was in turn remembered for his blackface lead in The Jazz Singer (1927), the aim was to imply that the production of Hot and Sweet would in some sense be a latter-day minstrel show (Parks Reference Parks2003). If so, Sparrow's was a prescient remark. At that time, scholarly readings of blackface minstrelsy had for some years interpreted the institution as the embodiment of racist caricature, denigrating the victims of slavery and legitimating the prejudices that helped sustain both the peculiar institution and the racial hierarchies that outlived it. More recently, though, some critics have identified in minstrelsy (particularly during its early years) a form of cultural ventriloquism expressing covert, bi-racial, working class criticism of white social, political and cultural elites, and thereby distilling from a shared (though not identical) oppression a sense of common cause between the races. For Eric Lott (Reference Lott1991, pp. 227, 241, 242–4), minstrelsy saw ‘racial insult … twinned with racial envy, moments of domination with moments of liberation’, while ‘at some “imaginary” level [the institution] attempted to resolve such contradictions’. Well-versed in its history, Parks shares this more nuanced reading. Threaded through their caricatures, he insists, minstrel shows of the 1830s and 1840s articulated ‘a bilateral agreement … in the longed-for unification of racial interests’ and even won the support of some abolitionists as a result (Parks Reference Parks2003).
If minstrelsy is understood as racist caricature, it would be difficult to explain why either Sparrow or Parks might conceive of the latter's work as a modern form of blackface (though the kudos of a major label release or the opportunity to speak truth to power may for Sparrow have trumped distaste for the exercise's perceived nature). If, by contrast, it is understood as expressing what Robert Cantwell (Reference Cantwell1996, p. 57) calls a ‘recognition of kinship and perhaps, in … shared oppression, a charge of fellow feeling’, then not just Hot and Sweet but Parks' Caribbean recordings as a whole might articulate a progressive politics of race and class. In any event, whether viable or not, the very fact that the minstrelsy association carries both reactionary and progressive implications is itself significant, for – as we have seen – similarly divergent interpretations may also be made of Parks' Caribbean ventures. Where minstrelsy is read as a form of exploitative mis-appropriation – as theft, even where inspired by envy or sanctioned as homage – it may resemble a species of cultural imperialism; where it is read as an outgrowth of European ‘folk theatricals’ like carnival, and thus as the product of an Atlantic diaspora, minstrelsy may be likened to – perhaps included within – Gilroy's black Atlantic counterculture (Lott Reference Lott1993; Cockrell Reference Cockrell1997, p. 141; Lhamon Reference Lhamon1998, p. 211). Considered in these terms, Parks' role as a latter-day minstrel appears as bold and valuable as it is hazardous and costly: risking nationalist criticism for being a corporate thief in liberal clothing as the price of his commitment to a multi-racial, trans-national, musical community of interests on common, good-neighbourly, pan-American grounds. As latter-day minstrel shows, though, Parks' Caribbean recordings do not caricature or denigrate; nor are they intended as one-sided acts of musical appropriation within some broader cultural imperialist dynamic. Rather, they aspire to be mutual aid exercises (at once creative and commercial) designed to find artistic common cause and foster trans-national concord – in his own words, ‘a harmonious product that would find a certain appeal across these [racial, class and national] lines’ (Parks 1993).
Towards a new world music
Insofar as Parks' Caribbean voyage of musical exploration not only crosses or transcends borders but in the process also invites diverging (cultural imperialist and counter-cultural black Atlantic) interpretations, recordings from The Esso Trinidad Steel Band to Hot and Sweet and beyond may be further illuminated if considered in terms of another concept similarly associated with human and cultural mobility, and also subject to contested readings: world music. Loosely understood as referring to the indigenous musical expression, traditional or not, of countries, regions and peoples lying beyond the advanced industrial (and particularly English-speaking) world, such as Africa, Latin America, the Middle East and Asia, the concept of world music has been read in different ways. To some observers it is an indiscriminate, catch-all phrase that ascribes to diverse forms of cultural expression a spurious exoticism, thereby estranging the music from potential listeners even as it claims to connect them (Negus Reference Negus1996, pp. 175–7; Feld Reference Feld2000; Frith Reference Frith, Born and Hesmondhalgh2000, pp. 305–22; Toynbee Reference Toynbee, Hesmondhalgh and Negus2002, p. 158). To others, it is little more than an entertainment industry marketing category, elaborated during the 1980s by a small group of music business entrepreneurs hoping to realise the commercial potentials of aspects of human creativity not yet reduced to marketable commodity. Understood as a function of growing physical and social mobility, cultural pluralism and international communication in an age of globalisation, however, world music to yet other observers is less an instrument of corporate gain or musical pigeon-holing than an expressive realisation of social, political and cultural equality, human diversity, and global community (Gillett Reference Gillett1998).
Even though world music is a broad, imprecise concept encompassing a great deal of diverse work, Parks' Caribbean recordings may lie beyond even its diffuse boundaries. Insofar as they warrant inclusion, though, Discover America and Clang of the Yankee Reaper would appear closer in nature to later, more high-profile American-led collaborations often cited as harbingers of the genre, such as Paul Simon's Graceland (1986). Hot and Sweet and the Esso Trinidad Steel Band, meanwhile, have much in common with Ry Cooder's well-publicised, critically acclaimed productions of the Cuban Buena Vista Social Club albums (1997–2000). None of these releases, by contrast, may be equated with more ‘home-grown’ types of world music such as the American ethno-musicological field recordings of Harold Courlander or Alan Lomax (both of whom collected in the Caribbean), or the work of Pakistani Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan or Senegal's Youssou n'dour. Wherever Parks' contributions lie within its broad field, assessments of these albums in relation to world music will in any case be informed by perceptions of the latter's nature, purpose and effects. To those who embrace what Simon Frith (Reference Frith, Born and Hesmondhalgh2000, p. 312) terms ‘the optimistic view of world music’, believing that more international exposure for non-first-world and non-Anglophone music benefits all parties, Parks' support for Trinidadian steel band and calypso will appear a pioneering attempt to increase opportunities for musicians, extend the horizons and enrich the tastes of audiences, and foster mutual understanding all around. By contrast, to those who believe that a ‘free trade in sounds’ rhetoric is perfectly suited to the interests of the first-world corporate music industry, the more successful Parks was in securing Warner Bros. Records' commitment to Caribbean music, the more misguided his efforts may have been – however well meaning (Rohlehr Reference Rohlehr1998, pp. 84–5; cf. Guilbault Reference Guilbault, Hesmondhalgh and Negus2002, pp. 196–9, 201–2).
Whichever understanding of Parks' Caribbean albums as world music obtains will also depend in part on an assessment of their auspices, a consideration which in turn leads back to the concepts of both cultural imperialism and the black Atlantic counterculture. There is no question that Parks' ability to release these works on a major American label like Warner Bros. Records depended on the backing he received from key executives, in this case, president Mo Ostin and executive vice president Joe Smith (it was the latter, in fact, who first brought the Esso Trinidad Steel Band to Parks' attention: ‘it's a steel band: Van Dyke, you like that kind of stuff’) (Parks Reference Parks2003). As businessmen working in a fiercely competitive industry, of course, neither man was keen to identify manifestly non-commercial genres or projects to invest in and lose money on. At the same time, though, their support for Parks' sequence of steel band and calypso albums was scarcely the stuff of which corporate accountants' dreams or cultural imperialist nightmares are made. During the late 1930s the growing market for calypsos in the United States may have been embraced by music industry agents as ‘indicative of a hopeful trend’ given the ‘desperate slump’ in domestic record sales; through the 1990s the burgeoning world music market may have served a similar function in another set of difficult commercial circumstances (Taylor Reference Taylor1999, pp. 1–2; Eldridge Reference Eldridge2002, p. 627). But when Parks began his Caribbean music explorations during the early 1970s, Warner Bros. Records in particular was in a period of sustained absolute and relative growth (‘percolating a lot of fast cash’, he later recalled) (Parks Reference Parks2003). As a result, the stakes for label executives in backing his non-mainstream ventures were comparatively low. If this meant that Parks received less financial support than top-selling Warner's artists like James Taylor or the Doobie Brothers (in relation to publicity, for example), then such relative neglect may in musical terms have been benign, granting Parks and his fellow musicians greater scope for creative manoeuvre.
Only if Parks' Caribbean recordings had proven highly successful commercially, of course, could the claim that cultural imperialist consequences do not follow automatically from the institutional and material contexts of their production be fully explored – and none of these albums had a significant sales impact. That the recordings' corporate, commercial origins did not constrain musical innovation, by contrast, may at least in part be explored – and explained – by way of their social contexts. Thus former WBR Creative Services head Stan Cornyn (Reference Cornyn2003) recalls how important Mo Ostin and Joe Smith had been in persuading Warner Communications Inc., the label's owners in New York, not to interfere with their thriving Los Angeles asset, and in themselves trusting talented people inside and outside the recording studios to deliver the goods, however novel or unusual they appeared: there was ‘an attitude of permissiveness from Mo and Joe, who might well have said “I don't know what's happening here but it seems to be working so just leave 'em alone”’. Likewise, the reputation that had won Parks his own Warner Bros. contract in 1967, as well as musical space thereafter, was creative rather than commercial: as producer Lenny Waronker (Reference Waronker2003) recalls, label bosses ‘understood the brilliance of the man, so they left him pretty much alone’. In short, as music writer Robert Lloyd has argued, during the early 1970s Warner Bros. Records ‘was a company that ran on freedom of expression … and if it was not exactly the People Taking Power, it was … as reasonable a facsimile as any major record label had ever cared, or dared, to offer’ (Sarlin Reference Sarlin1975, p. 206; Lloyd Reference Lloyd1988, pp. 240–1).
Moreover, while the accommodating, comparatively artist-friendly, approach of Mo Ostin and Joe Smith played a key role in enabling Parks to carve from his own creative reputation the space to record and produce his Caribbean albums, their creation was also a function (appropriately so, for ‘world music’ in the making) of what Simon Frith has called ‘globalisation from below’. According to Frith, this process involves less the ‘inexorable forces of … capital’ than ‘semi-formal organisations of knowledge and friendship’ – musician-centred communities and networks in particular (Frith Reference Frith, Born and Hesmondhalgh2000, pp. 319–20). As far as the dissemination of Trinidadian music is concerned, the efforts of radicals involved with venues such as the Village Vanguard and Café Society in Depression-era and war-time Manhattan had been early examples of such grass-roots, trans-national networking; another was the ‘Calypso After Midnight’ concert celebrating the island's artists and culture, sponsored by the progressive People's Songs organisation (including folklorist Alan Lomax, musician Pete Seeger and producer Moe Asch) and held at New York Town Hall in December 1946 (Stowe Reference Stowe1998; Cowley Reference Cowley1999). Of course, no such grass-roots networks and ventures, however accomplished, can erase imperial histories or unilaterally correct exploitative relationships. Nor is it sufficient to address Western or corporate domination solely in terms of the moral stances or personal efforts of individuals: as Steven Feld notes, ‘academic investigation of world music’ has documented ‘the uneven rewards [and] the unsettling representations’ that can lie beneath ‘the rhetoric of “free” flow and “greater” access’ (Goodwin and Gore Reference Goodwin and Gore1990, pp. 68, 78; Feld Reference Feld2000, p. 151). At the same time, though, such initiatives clearly had some impact, and Parks' Caribbean work certainly belongs in part to this tradition.
Abandon flagship: Clang of the Yankee Reaper
Neither subscriptions to the ‘optimistic view of world music’ nor associations with ‘globalisation from below’ preclude other contextualisations of Van Dyke Parks' steel band and calypso-related work. Thus confident, populist rhetoric had accompanied, not challenged, the post-imperial, corporate liberal order as it extended across the Caribbean during the twentieth century, enabling the United States to supplant Great Britain as the dominant regional power (much the same tone would characterise Parks' own Warner Bros. Records: in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the very embodiment of successful hip capitalism) (Hoskyns Reference Hoskyns2005, pp. 8–12, 36–7, 49). Raw materials, investment opportunities, markets and labour were integral to this growth in US influence – and profits – across the area, and while Parks' record label did not need Trinidadian songs to make its fortune during the early 1970s in the same way that Al Jolson's The Jazz Singer had enriched Warner Bros. Pictures during the late 1920s, that did not mean that his contributions to the elaboration of a pan-American music were thereby detached from the spectres of commercial exploitation or cultural imperialism. Yet even as Parks relied on the machinery of the corporate entertainment industry to produce and market that music, he was far from a star-spangled booster or corporate apologist. As if to underline that fact, the fourth and final part of his Caribbean album sequence would offer a critical vision of a good neighbourly Trinidadian–American relationship with little left to share, and of an industrial superpower in decline. His two Caribbean solo album titles are in this sense an index of Parks' sensitivity towards not only the great potentials but also – given the cultural, political, social and economic domains within which he worked – the risks or shortcomings of pan-American exchanges. For whereas Discover America may be read as a prospectus for aspects of the new, world music (perhaps not coincidentally, highlighting songs from a time when for many Trinidadians the United States embodied a brighter future), its follow-up Clang of the Yankee Reaper (1975) looks back anxiously in time, as if measuring Uncle Sam's lengthening shadow for his grave.
This was hardly surprising, for by the time of the album's recording and release, perceptions of national decline had become endemic. Abroad, the failed military intervention in Vietnam had squandered the country's lifeblood, drained its self-confidence, sapped its economic strength, and undermined its internal cohesion and moral standing. At home, neither a devalued dollar nor retrenching industrial giants appeared able to stem the influx of imported automobiles and electronics; the Watergate scandal spoke, meanwhile, of a state, if not a nation, in disarray. As if all this were not enough, the first of the decade's oil crises had brought home to the Republic the material limits of an independence lived out on four wheels. Clang of the Yankee Reaper makes initial symbolic allusion to oil and defeat in the ‘great game in Asia’ by featuring on its cover Parks in period riverboat gambler costume in front of the ‘Spouter Inn’, the point of departure for Captain Ahab's ambitious yet suicidal trans-Pacific pursuit of the sperm whale – then the nation's chief source of oil – in Herman Melville's Moby-Dick (1851). The album's title song, co-written by Parks, then adds solemn tones to the image, portraying the passing of the American era via its use of temporal metaphors and symbols of decline and by the elegiac melody of the chorus. Lyrical allusions to oil, money and the Shah of Iran, meanwhile, offer explicit reference to the nation's growing dependence upon foreign powers and raw materials, and the consequences for its strategic autonomy. So too, more obliquely, does talk of an obligation to ‘drink tea from China’ – the context being Washington's moves towards official recognition of Mao's Communist regime, an initiative designed to help the US withdraw from Vietnam and to re-open key Asian markets for its exporters.
Though geographically distinct, these allusions to the Middle and Far East also serve, via ironic comparison, to highlight the deterioration of (or shortcomings in) Washington's Caribbean connections. Thus, however much the United States had once displaced Great Britain in pre-revolutionary China, Clang of the Yankee Reaper's title song now equates a thinly veiled President Richard Nixon with Queen Victoria's consort Prince Albert; Britain's imperial setting sun, it implies, may have simply lit the way for its successor's impending decline. Likewise, having taken over London's imperial burden in Iran, Washington now faces the prospects of becoming every bit as reliant on its resources and indebted to its leaders as its predecessor; dependence on Middle Eastern oil, post-Yom Kippur War oil price rises, and their consequences for US energy supplies provide manifest contexts for the title song's pointed reminder: ‘just think of him’ – the Shah – ‘when your light starts to dim’. The album's opening song is in short, and as Parks himself later recalled, ‘a song of regret, a song of loss’: now that ‘the good old days are dead’ and the old empire's ‘sun’ (or son) is ‘in the moonlight’, Uncle Sam appears less romanticised than overshadowed – soon to become as much of an ‘also-ran’, perhaps, as Prince Albert himself.
In such circumstances, the American–Trinidadian relationship also reveals its darker side. Indeed, the comparisons between the United States and a British empire whose own lights had supposedly gone out in 1914 are only strengthened by their inclusion on an album that retains a clearly Caribbean musical identity, featuring calypso or reggae rhythms as well as steelband accompaniments on most of its tracks. For whereas Trinidad and Tobago had once welcomed closer links to the United States as a step towards liberation from British imperial control, the disaster in Vietnam had now made it plain that neither the former's appeal nor its powers were unlimited. Not that all evils once ascribed to the British are now visited on their American descendants; nor, for that matter, are the islanders themselves absolved of all responsibility for their country's shortcomings. Still, a number of songs on Clang of the Yankee Reaper clearly speak to the entropic conditions that appeared to be gripping the United States and, by implication, undermining its appeal abroad. The album's title song, for example, is followed by an arrangement of Winston Monseque's ‘There'll Be No City on the Hill’, a piece whose lyrical references to class conflict and social degradation only underwrite its titular dismissal of one of the nation's original idealistic self-definitions. We are some distance here, in short, from the mutual trans-national attractions of Discover America's ‘Bing Crosby’ or ‘FDR in Trinidad’. In this sense, Clang of the Yankee Reaper identifies from a metropolitan perspective some of the tensions and shortcomings that Sparrow's Hot and Sweet had previously spoken of from the new world periphery. From whichever end of the flagpole the relationship was viewed, however, few listening to Parks' fourth Caribbean album could expect, or wish, to see it wrapped up in the stars and stripes forever.
Conclusion
If the United States' former status as the embodiment of and inspiration for post-imperial liberty, community and prosperity had by this point dissolved in the face of quasi-imperial conflict and domestic decline, wherein do Parks' Caribbean albums locate enduring value? Not in Trinidadian nationalism, shorn of any pretence to allegiance in songs like ‘Past That Stage’ and sobered by the island's early 1970s experiences of social upheaval and political protest. Not in nostalgic appeals to the royalist pomp and traditional circumstance of British imperial rule, either: an outmoded order undeserving of rehabilitation by the mere passage of time or in light of Uncle Sam's misfortunes. If value lies anywhere, it is not in any individual nation state or even geographical location but in the achievements and potentials, rhythms, melodies and arrangements – most of all, in the spirit – of the music itself, where it has been throughout this series of recordings: as celebrated in Clang's homage to steel band pioneer Winston ‘Spree’ Simon (‘Tribute to Spree’) as it had been on Discover America's ‘Steelband Music’ (both written by Roaring Lion). Insofar as Parks had been inspired to begin his Caribbean voyage of exploration by the region's musical traditions rather than any critique of British or American foreign policy or preoccupation with Trinidadian nationalism, that conclusion serves to validate his original intents.
Artists are as a rule no more inspired by politics, ideology or diplomacy than by the prospects of serving the agendas of cultural critics. Nonetheless, for students of American popular music the value of Van Dyke Parks' early 1970s voyage of discovery lies not only in the attention it seeks to draw to forgotten, marginal and overlooked areas of circum-Caribbean creativity, or in its imaginative articulation of a pan-American, trans-national, musical vocabulary and grammar: a new world music before world music was new. It also lies in the opportunities it provides for multi-disciplinary interpretation. The creation and production of such music invites – perhaps also demands – a criticism informed by a range of concepts and theories drawn from such fields as musicology, cultural theory, political economy and social history. These frameworks cannot, and hopefully should not, exhaust the pleasures of the musical imagination or performance; while directed towards and ideally casting light on the music, however, they may in the process also illuminate both the changing and the invariant circumstances of its creation.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Kim Johnson, Gordon Rohlehr, John Cowley and Ray Funk for their guidance on aspects of calypso and steel band history; as well as two Popular Music referees for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article. I am also indebted to Stan Cornyn, Lenny Waronker, Martin Kibbee and Andrew Wickham for their recollections of working with Van Dyke Parks in the 1960s and 1970s. Last but not least, I am very grateful to Mr Parks for his willingness to devote valuable time to discussions of his love for, and his efforts to promote, Trinidadian music and its makers.
