Description
Book SynopsisPart 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.
Trade Review“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 *
Table of ContentsList of Illustrations ix Acknowledgments xi Notes on the Text xv Introduction 1 1. For the Love of Music: Up from the Panyards and at the Orphanage 23 2. Working as a Bandsman 42 3. Listening to Roy Sounding 76 4. Leading the Band 99 5. Remembering with Pictures 135 6. Working with Roy: Musicians and Friends Speak 183 7. Circulation: Summarizing a Career 207 Afterword. Writing Voices 229 Notes 233 Select Discography 259 References 261 About the Companion CD 277 Index 279
