Calypso+Instruments

__ What is the history of Calypso Music? __

Africans were also brought to many Central American, South American, and Caribbean countries to work as slaves on the plantations. Many people came to the island from India and France as well as West Africa, bringing with them their favourite traditions, songs, and music. When they settled on Trinidad, they heard each other's music, and eventually the African-Trinidadians invented Calypso, a kind of music that sounded a little bit African and a little bit European but it was definitely uniquely Trinidadian.

__Calypso__ began as a type of __protest music__. African-Trinidadians in the eighteen-hundreds were not allowed to talk as they worked, but they were allowed to sing. Many of the song leaders became very good at improvising words to songs in order to comment on the news of the day. ("The Banana Boat Song -Day-O)" of Harry Belafonte fame is the type of call-and-response work song that this could be done with.) Calypso songs also had improvised words that commented on the latest news and sometimes on life in general, but they were more clearly protest songs that often featured sarcasm and wit. The subversive nature of the music alarmed the authorities, who in 1884 banned the playing of skin drums.

That hardly stopped the Calypsonians; they just made instruments out of bamboo instead. Bamboo makes a nice sound with a definite [|pitch] when you hit it with a stick; the bigger and longer the piece of bamboo, the lower the sound. So the calypso players cut many different lengths of bamboo and formed what they called tamboo bamboo bands. The government then banned the playing of bamboo tubes, claiming that the bands encouraged violence, but the Calypsonians still kept playing. Their bands had always included instruments other than skin drums or bamboo: stringed instruments, for example, and maracas, and bottle-and-spoon. But in the 1930's they began to make drums out of metal objects. These instruments were known as steel drums or pans. What kinds of instruments play in Calypso music?