![]() ![]() His 1957 song "Carnival Boycott" protested the Trinidad and Tobago government's failed attempts at promoting calypso and carnival. Sparrow's contributions to the development of the carnival festivities in Trinidad and Tobago are unprecedented. The release of "Jean and Dinah," a song protesting the behavior of the Americans stationed at Trinidad's military bases during World War II, earned him the title Calypso King at the 1956 Dimanche Gras show, the annual exhibition show for calypsonians on the night before the opening of carnival. In 1954 he first performed his own work at a calypso tent on South Quay, Port-of-Spain, performing "The Parrot and the Monkey" under the sobriquet Little Sparrow. Although he has admitted to working with writers and arrangers at times, he has composed a great deal of his own music. Sparrow taught himself to play the guitar and studied the composition styles of the reigning calypsonians of the 1950s to work out where he wanted the art form to go. At the age of twenty, he ventured into calypso, drawing inspiration from Lord Melody, Lord Invader (the original singer of the famed "Rum and Coca-Cola"), Lord Kitchener, and others. At the Newtown Boys' School in Port-of-Spain, Sparrow was head choirboy, singing baritone and tenor in Gregorian chants and classic hymns in Latin. Sparrow was born in the small fishing village of Gran Roi, Grenada, in 1935 and migrated with his family to Trinidad when he was one. He is an eleven-time Trinidad and Tobago Calypso Monarch and an eight-time Trinidad and Tobago Carnival Road March Competition winner. He has repeatedly filled some of the largest world venues, including New York City's Madison Square Garden. Slinger Francisco, called "The Mighty Sparrow," is an internationally recognized calypsonian, one of the very few known by both his real name and his sobriquet. ![]()
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