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Carnival, Calypso and Steel Pan
A Bibliographic Guide to Popular Music of the
English-speaking Caribbean and its Diaspora

By John Gray

Price: $124.95
Binding: Cloth
ISBN: 9780984413454
496 pages
African Diaspora Press
Pub. Date: March 2015

SUBJECTS
Music -- Ethnomusicology
Music -- Popular
Performing Arts
Area Studies -- Caribbean Studies
Ethnic Studies -- Black/African Diaspora Studies

SERIES TITLE: Black Music Reference Series
SERIES NUMBER: 6

REVIEWS AND AWARDS
"A bibliographic guide such as this one is only as useful as it is comprehensive, and this volume is definitively thorough across several parameters. The most impressive quality... is its breadth, highlighted by the number of annotations, the variety of sources, its meticulous organization, and use of detail.." -- Fontes Artis Musicae

"Best Reference of 2015" -- Library Journal

"With his most recent installment in the Black Music Reference Series, Gray continues to set the standard for bibliographic guides on black musical arts and culture...It is nothing short of a seminal work." -- Music Reference Services Quarterly

"...an essential starting point for research on [Caribbean carnival arts and music] that should be in libraries throughout the country, indeed the region, as well as in the collections of every serious scholar." -- Trinidad and Tobago Guardian

DESCRIPTION
A companion to the author’s earlier volume Jamaican Popular Music, this landmark new work helps fill a major gap in the reference literature. For the first time ever it offers students and researchers an in-depth guide to the large body of materials available on masquerade and popular music traditions of the English-speaking Caribbean. Comprised of some 3400 annotated entries it documents a literature, both popular and scholarly, that now spans more than 85 years and ranges across disciplines as diverse as social and cultural history, anthropology, ethnomusicology, literature and economics.

The book’s main focus is on three tightly intertwined topics—Carnival, calypso and steel pan—and how each has evolved, both inside of Trinidad, their most important hub, and abroad in the large West Indian enclaves of New York, London and Toronto. The Carnival side of this trinity, a critical showcase for the region’s music and dance styles, is treated comprehensively. This includes an unprecedented level of detail on each of the four major Caribbean Carnivals—Trinidad Carnival, Brooklyn’s Labor Day Carnival, London’s Notting Hill Carnival, and Toronto’s Caribana—as well as important precursors such as Harlem’s West Indian Day Parades of the 1940s and ’50s and the early London Carnivals organized by Claudia Jones. Carnival’s musical aspects, both calypso and steel pan, are also covered in depth. In the case of calypso that encompasses all of its various forms, from its antecedents in kalinda stick-fighting to the “jump and wave” soca of today. A multitude of contemporary offshoots, e.g., binghi, chutney soca, ragga soca, ringbang, and gospelypso, are also documented in full. Numerous other sources help illuminate calypso’s central role as a vehicle for social and political commentary and its perspective on issues as diverse as immigration, race and gender relations, and national identity. Steel pan, calypso’s cousin, is discussed from the music’s introduction on the regional and international scene in the 1950s to its more recent role in the music programs of North America and Great Britain. A substantial Biographical and Critical Studies section documents the contributions made to these traditions by almost 600 individual performers and ensembles.

Citations span from 1852 to 2012, with the bulk having been published between the 1930s and 2012. They encompass musical and cultural analyses, ethnographies, oral histories, popular histories and reportage along with a wealth of archival, audio-visual, and electronic resources. The book concludes with an extensive reference section that includes a list of Sources Consulted, a guide to relevant Libraries and Archives, two appendices, and separate Author and Subject Indexes.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction
I.   CULTURAL HISTORY AND THE ARTS
II.  CARIBBEAN FESTIVAL ARTS
III. MUSIC OF THE ENGLISH-SPEAKING CARIBBEAN AND ITS DIASPORA
IV.  REGIONAL STUDIES
         Antigua and Barbuda
         Arizona
         Aruba
         Bahamas
         Barbados
         Belize
         Bermuda
         California
         Canada
         Colombia
         Costa Rica
         Curaçao
         District of Columbia
         Dominica
         Dominican Republic
         Finland
         Florida
         Great Britain
         Grenada and Carriacou
         Guyana
         Honduras
         Illinois
         Jamaica
         Japan
         Michigan
         Montserrat
         New York
         Nicaragua
         North Carolina
         Ohio
         Panama
         St. Kitts and Nevis
         St. Lucia
         St. Martin/St. Maarten
         St. Vincent and the Grenadines
         Suriname
         Sweden
         Switzerland
         Trinidad and Tobago
            Genre Studies
              Calypso/Soca
              Chutney
              Parang
              Rapso
              Steel Pan
          Venezuela
          Virgin Islands
V.  BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL STUDIES
Sources Consulted
Libraries and Archives
Appendix I: List of Individuals and Ensembles by Idiom/Occupation
Appendix II: List of Individuals and Ensembles by Country
Author Index
Subject Index

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
JOHN GRAY is an independent scholar specializing in the performing arts and traditional religion of Africa and the African Diaspora. His previous music-related titles include Afro-Brazilian Music; Afro-Cuban Music; Jamaican Popular Music; From Vodou to Zouk; African Music; Fire Music; and Blacks in Classical Music. His work Baila! A Bibliographic Guide to Afro-Latin Dance Musics from Mambo to Salsa, was the recipient of the 2015 Vincent H. Duckles Award (for best book-length bibliography or reference work published in 2013) from the Music Library Association.


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