How the ‘Calypso Craze’ Swept 1950s America

In 1956, Harry Belafonte’s Calypso album sparked interest in Caribbean culture in the United States. Often cited as the first record by a solo performer to sell a million copies, the album included the breakout opening track “Day-O (Banana Boat Song),” which would become Belafonte’s signature song. It also ignited the “calypso craze,” a short-lived fad built around notions of Caribbean culture, music and “island life.”

Belafonte was colloquially dubbed the “King of Calypso,” a title historically given to the winner of Trinidad’s annual Calypso Monarch competition during Carnival, a festive season of public celebrations held before the Christian period of Lent (also called Mardi Gras).

Yet much about calypso—and Belafonte’s connection to it—is widely misunderstood. Calypso is a style of folk music originating from Trinidad and Tobago. By Belafonte’s own admission, Calypso was not actually a traditional calypso record.

Belafonte, who was Jamaican American, was openly critical of how Caribbean music was marketed and adapted for U.S. audiences. Many songs released during America’s calypso trend played into general Caribbean stereotypes, sometimes making a mockery of the traditional music. Despite that, some African American performers capitalized on the trend as a chance to sell records and explore creativity within the African diaspora.

Modern calypso music emerged in Trinidad in the early 19th century as mostly improvised songs performed during Carnival celebrations. It is rooted in West African griot court singing tradition, a form of oral history that came to Trinidad with enslaved Africans in the 17th century. Trinidad’s laboring class developed the style we know today, and it features a storyteller typically making social commentary.

“It wasn’t something that was listened to all the time but would be performed similar to how we might listen to Christmas carols around the holidays,” Shane Vogel, professor of Black studies and chair of theater, dance and performance studies at Yale University explains. “It would be a very kind of playful but also biting critique of poverty and colonial rule that was couched in sarcasm… There was also a kind of boasting element to calypso. It would be performed in competitions to see who would score the best hits in a kind of battle of words and wit in song.”

Characteristics of calypso music include call-and-response, satire and percussion instruments like congas, bongos and steelpans or the steel drum, which Vogel explains was created by working class Trinidadians during World War II.

“Calypsonians and musicians in Trinidad would take discarded steel drums that would hold oil, and they hammered the drum lid into a curve to be able to create different tones,” he says. “The steel pan is a distinctly Trinidadian instrument.”

One of the earliest known calypso recordings was made in 1914 by the Victor Gramophone Company of New York. In the 1920s, calypso tents were erected for calypsonians to perform during Carnival season.

By the late 1930s, calypso performers like Lord Invader and the Roaring Lion were stepping onto the scene. The late 1930s also saw the first “Calypso Boom” when Decca Records started bringing calypsonians from Trinidad to New York to record music and perform in nightclubs.

One such performer was Calypsonian Lord Kitchener (sometimes called Kitch), who gained popularity in his hometown of Port-of-Spain before traveling to the U.S. to make records. He produced hundreds of calypso songs until his death in 2001.

During World War II, American soldiers stationed at military bases in Trinidad latched onto calypso music, furthering its international audience. The first recording studios in Trinidad were also built around that time. 

As part of the growing interest in calypso music, entertainer the Duke of Iron and his Trinidad Calypso Troubadours were featured in several episodes of WNYC’s “Adventures of Music” radio series in 1940, leading to the Duke’s own radio show called “Calypso.” His series featured original music, classic calypso tunes and songs in patois, Trinidadian French Creole.

One of the most well-known calypso songs is “Rum and Coca-Cola,” but most people don’t know the original version was made by Lord Invader in 1943. American comedian Morey Amsterdam heard Invader’s original while in Trinidad and stole the song. It was then performed by the Andrews Sisters, whose version topped the U.S. charts in 1945. Lord Invader sued Amsterdam, eventually winning the case.

In 1956, performer the Mighty Sparrow continued the calypso tradition in Trinidad with his hit song “Jean and Dinah.” But it was Belafonte’s Calypso album that same year that really opened the floodgates for Caribbean exotica in the United States.

“Calypso became commodified around and immediately after World War II. But about 10 years later, Harry Belafonte tips things over,” Vogel says. Vogel’s book Stolen Time: Black Fad Performance and the Calypso Craze examines the “calypsomania” of the 1950s.

Jazz singers Sarah Vaughan and Dinah Washington, Latin artists like Tito Puente and pop singers like Pat Boone all jumped on the bandwagon and recorded calypso songs. Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Jordan had also dipped their toes in the calypso waters with tracks like “Stone Cold Dead in the Market” even before the 1950s frenzy.

“There was a kind of Caribbean patois or lilt in the voice,” Vogel says of Western artists who tried to make calypso music. “It also happened in visual culture, too. So, palm trees, coconuts, island imagery, ocean moonlight, all of that would be on album covers but also would appear on commercial products… to use this island imagery to evoke something exotic.”

The craze extended beyond music to theater performances, television variety shows and Hollywood movies like the 1957 films Calypso Heat Wave and Bop Girl Goes Calypso.

But record executives and marketers often simplified the music for mass consumption, stripping away its cultural specificity and political edge. Belafonte warned that “the sham engineers of the music industry, who steer the wheels of public opinion, are driving the good features of calypso into the ground.”

“It’s precisely the fact that the people who are selling it don’t know what they’re talking about. [Belafonte] made this album out of his own respect for Caribbean culture, but it took on a life of its own," says Vogel.

Despite its mixed legacy, the calypso craze created some opportunities for Black performers to be seen, express creativity and explore the greater African diaspora.

“Mass culture is complicated,”  Vogel says. “There are constraints when it comes to representation. Unless you own the means of producing mass culture, you have to work within those constraints, and that’s how Black culture is created. It becomes an opportunity to reappropriate what’s been appropriated and to point out the ridiculousness of the appropriation and to create something truly original and inventive on the grounds of that appropriation.”

Ultimately, after about nine months, the calypso craze died out mostly due to the rising popularity of rock ’n’ roll, though it continues as a revered tradition in Trinidad today.