Roy Cape: A Life on the Calypso and Soca Bandstand

Jocelyne Guilbault; Roy Cape

Published by Duke University Press 2014

Roy Cape

A Life on the Calypso and Soca Bandstand

Jocelyne Guilbault and Roy Cape

https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822376163

Overview
Contents

About this book

Part ethnography, part biography, and part Caribbean music history, Roy Cape is about the making of reputation and circulation, and about the meaning of labor and work ethics. An experiment in storytelling, it joins Roy's voice with that of ethnomusicologist Jocelyne Guilbault.

Author / Editor information

Jocelyne Guilbault is Professor of Music at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Governing Sound: The Cultural Politics of Trinidad's Carnival Musics and Zouk: World Music in the West Indies.

Roy Cape (born in Trinidad in 1942) is an internationally renowned calypso and soca musician and bandleader. He has toured widely, played on hundreds of recordings, and released eight albums with his band Roy Cape All Stars.

Reviews

“The book is rich in the details of Cape’s life and his times. . . .Recommended.”

-- T. E. Miller Choice

“This is a superb book on a much-neglected area of world music: the pivotal role played by the bandleader, who for too long has remained in the shadows.”

-- Charles de Ledesma Songlines

"The unique style of interweaving storytelling and anthropological research with the voices of Roy Cape, the subject of this work, and Jocelyne Guilbault, an astute ethnomusicologist, is both refreshing and exciting.... Roy Cape: A Life on the Calypso and Soca Bandstand is a mustread for all researchers, students, aspiring musicians, and aficionados of popular music in general and of Caribbean music and popular music culture in particular."

-- Donna P. Hope Journal of Anthropological Research

"Jocelyne Guilbault... is one of the few non-Caribbean ethnomusicologists who has researched Eastern Caribbean music as if she is an insider, particularly from the perspective of band members rather than headline singers. Together in unique collaboration, this matched pair has created a short book that both illuminates the career of a pivotal musician and constructs a refreshing approach to narrative, diologic ethnomusicology."

-- Donald Hill American Anthropologist

“Roy Cape: A Life on the Calypso and Soca Bandstand is a successful path finding experiment in terms of its content as well as of its form…. In departing from traditional or conventional biography towards the multivocal, multimodal presentation of Roy Cape, the book alters researchers to the fact that they, like Nobel-Prize winner Derek Walcott, need to create new metaphors for and forms of communicating our collective (musical) experience.”

-- Louis Regis World of Music

"[A]n admirable collaboration, both in producing new perspectives to existing Caribbean scholarship and in demonstrating that there is still much to learn from 'behind the scenes' of the West Indian carnival music industry."

-- Amelia K. Ingram Latin American Music Review

"[W]hile reading Roy Cape, readers may end up feeling as though they are sitting around a coffee table in Trinidad with Guilbault and Cape, passing around old pictures and telling school stories or reminiscing about bands, sometimes with friends dropping by to lime (laugh, joke, drink, and tell stories)."

-- Gage Averill Musicultures

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
CONTENTS Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
ILLUSTRATIONS Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Publicly Available Download PDF	xi
NOTES ON THE TEXT Publicly Available Download PDF	xv
INTRODUCTION Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
1. FOR THE LOVE OF MUSIC Up from the Panyards and at the Orphanage Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	23
2. WORKING AS A BANDSMAN Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	42
3. LISTENING TO ROY SOUNDING Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	76
4. LEADING THE BAND Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	99
5. REMEMBERING WITH PICTURES Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	135
6. WORKING WITH ROY Musicians and Friends Speak Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	183
7. CIRCULATION Summarizing a Career Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	207
AFTERWORD Writing Voices Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	229
NOTES Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	233
SELECT DISCOGRAPHY Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	259
REFERENCES Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	261
ABOUT THE COMPANION CD Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	277
INDEX Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	279

Language: English
Publisher: Duke University Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Pages
- Main content: 304
Illustrations
- Other: 57 illustrations

eBook

Published: October 7, 2014
ISBN: 9780822376163