Calypso vs Mento
I blame Harry Belafonte. He called his 1956 breakout album, consisting almost entirely of songs in the Jamaican mento style,
Calypso!. And Jamaican musicians very definitely know on which side their bread is buttered. So when the cruise ships in the 1950s & 60s disembarked on the North Shore and their passengers asked for some of those calypso songs like Harry Belafonte sings, the hotel house bands would just wink at each other and sang them what they wanted to hear.
Ironically, Robert Mitchum's "
Calypso, is like so", released a year later, & which sadly failed to trouble the compilers of the Billboard Top 100,
is genuine calypso, well received by Trini calypsonians, coming about because he fell in love with the music while filming '
Heaven knows, Mr Allison' on Trinidad's sister island, Tobago.
At any event, the 1,2&,- &4& (DDu uDu) rhythm of Jamaican mento got re-baptised as 'calypso', or generic 'island' strum.
But calypso is native to Trinidad, not Jamaica. And Trinidad is some 1100 miles to the south-east of Jamaica, with a very different history and culture; and until the 1920s (with the inauguration of the West Indies Cricket Board, 1927), there was virtually no contact of any kind between the two islands. In the actual, Trini, calypso rhythm, it's the 2nd beat of the bar that's dropped, not the 3rd: 1,-&3,4, (D, uD,D). Say to yourself '
Walk! The big dog. Walk! The big dog.' and you'll be pretty much on the Trini calypso beat.
In point of fact, Trinidadian calypso tends to use all 8 1/8th notes in a bar of 4/4, so that it goes
DuD
uDu
Du (
Walk up to the big-ger dog-gie), but the essence (the pulse) is that '
Walk! The big dog.' rhythm, I mentioned earlier.
You can hear it to great effect in King Selewa's (a modern-day calypsonian, based in Marseilles of all places) cover of Lord Executor's (Philip Garcia's) 1937 calypso
I don' know how the young men livin' - note though that this is an 'old-style' calypso in a minor key. Most 'modern' calypsos (say from Lord Kitchener onwards) are in a major key:
Read more about it here
'Calypso' strum - is it in fact a mento strum?'