Jean and Dinah

The prize was $40. In 1956 a young Slinger Francisco, the Mighty Sparrow, won both the Calypso King crown and the Carnival Road March with Jean and Dinah, the first of what would become eight Road March titles. The winner of the Carnival Queen beauty contest that year took home $7,500. Sparrow answered with a song, Carnival Boycott, and persuaded about half the singers to stay away from the competition with him. He later claimed credit for the improvements that followed for calypso and steelband musicians. The song itself was a sharp, funny piece of social reporting. American military bases on Trinidad had supported a large trade in prostitution. When many of the bases closed after the war, the women who had depended on the servicemen were left desperate. Sparrow, still in his early twenties, sang about them by name, standing on street corners and now willing to settle for far less, and crowed in the chorus that the Yankees had gone and Sparrow had taken over. The alternative title, Yankees Gone, says it plainly. It became an international hit and Sparrow's breakthrough. The American actor Robert Mitchum recorded it for his 1957 album Calypso... is like so, and Sparrow went on to be known as the Calypso King of the World. Jean and Dinah remains his most famous song, a carnival hit that also told the truth about what a foreign army leaves behind.