OPINION: The Professor Who Never Held a Chair

By Professor C. Justin Robinson

Around 4:00 p.m. on Sunday September 27, I heard the news that the Mighty Sparrow had passed on to Blessed Memory. I hesitated because after all the guy had “died” a few times. In 1969 Mighty Sparrow recorded and sang the calypso "Sparrow Dead" to mock and challenge false rumours of his death and failing health.

Sparrow was a constant on my radio as a boy in St. Vincent. The songs were our anthems. Capitalism gone mad, Where the Lizard, Education, Dan is man, Wanted Man and many more. As I got older, I smiled that my religious relatives sang along to the song “all saltfish sweet.” Sorry, you will only get that if you are West Indian. I celebrated when he came back and won the road march with Don’t Back Back on me. The wit of Lying Excuses parts 1 and 2 are simply unmatched.

I have no ear for music, so I loved the lyrics and the ability to capture complex issues in a witty and musically appealing manner. As I got older, I formed the view that Sparrow was one of the finest social analysts this region has ever produced. He was more effective than the rest of us because he did his analysis in public, in our own language, with a chorus.

I may have learnt economics in lecture halls in the Caribbean, the United States and England, but some of my earliest lessons in political economy came from a calypsonian born in Grenada, made in Trinidad, and sung everywhere a West Indian could find a radio.

I think of "Jean and Dinah" the song that launched his career in 1956, as the best calypso ever written. On its surface it is a funny story of the American soldiers leaving the military base at Chaguaramas and the ladies of the night of Port of Spain losing their market. Underneath it is a sharp account of reclaiming sovereignty and what happens to a dependent local economy when the foreign spending that props it up walks away.

In 1959, he released "Simpson" to combat early rumours that he had passed away, as I said, the guy has died a few times.

Consider the song "Federation!" In 1962, released as the West Indies Federation collapsed. Sparrow’s diagnosis of small states with big egos, and a failure to believe that we were stronger together than apart is still valid sixty-four years later.
You can’t beat "Dan is the Man," a song that was absolutely relatable to those of us in school at the time. Here was a young man from the working class taking the colonial curriculum apart, line by absurd line. Those of us tear down CXC should take note. CXC needs to be held to account but definitely not destroyed.

As Trinidad and Tobago, the oil rich aristocrats and big spenders of the Caribbean experienced the switch from oil boom to oil bust and ended up in an IMF program in the 1980s Sparrow released the beautiful number "Capitalism Gone Mad." You will not find a clearer explanation of Import Cost Push Inflation and this one was set to music.

CLR James described Sparrow as a genuinely West Indian artist, rooted in the people and speaking for them without apology. UWI Scholar Professor Gordon Rohlehr spent decades proving the point in scholarship and titled his collection of essays on Sparrow with the line that summed him up, “My Whole Life is Calypso”. In 1987 The University of the West Indies was awarded an Honorary Doctor of Letters (DLitt), one of the better decisions we have made.

In a region still too inclined to wait for someone else to validate us, fund us, or save us, Sparrow's career is a case study in what our region needs in this new world order. Sparrow was excellence built locally, owned locally, and exported with confidence.

Sparrow was not a saint, and he never pretended to be. A Vincentian calypsonian once said to me, “Sparrow sings too much smut”. Sparrow’s songs were racy as often as they were profound, and he would have laughed at any tribute that tried to tidy him up. A central part of his genius was that he refused the choice between the respectable and the real and gave us both, in the same verse.

I was amazed when Sparrow came back and won the crown in 1992 with the “Both of them” and “Survival.” Sparrow was a public intellectual; he just never held a chair.
As a friend of mine wrote, “Well boys, Kitch gone, Melody gone and now the Birdie gone too. They have left us with a wonderful legacy.” Rest well, Birdie, the lecture is over but thankfully the lessons are not.