Endless Vibrations

Garfield Blackman, born in Lengua Village near Princes Town, made his name as Lord Shorty with the 1963 hit Cloak and Dagger. Then he spent nearly a decade experimenting. He wanted to fuse calypso with the music of Trinidad's Indian community, including chutney, and with the dholak, tabla and dhantal that drive it. The result he eventually called the soul of calypso: soca. The first attempt did not land the way he hoped. Shorty thought of his 1973 song Indrani as the start of soca, but many listeners heard it as more chutney than calypso. So he adjusted, replacing some of the Indian instruments with Western ones, the first of several evolutions of the sound. He also borrowed from neighbouring islands: after seeing Exile One play cadence-lypso in Dominica, he worked with Dominican lyricists on Creole songs. Endless Vibrations and Soul of Calypso were the records that, by most accounts, carried soca to its greatest international fame in the 1970s. Shorty did not stay with what he had built. In 1984 he said he was disenchanted with soca, which he felt was being used for the wrong reasons. He embraced Rastafari, took the name Ras Shorty I, and moved his family to the Piparo forest, later returning with a soca-gospel style he called jamoo; his anti-drug song Watch Out My Children was adopted by the UN. He died in 2000, remembered as the Father of Soca. Every Carnival season since has been, in a sense, an extension of the vibration he started.