ABSTRACT
So ended David Edgecombe’s review (Edgecombe 1975) of the Calypso Competition 1974-5 on Montserrat, a small English-speaking Caribbean island of 10,000 in the Eastern Caribbean, a Leeward island of the Lesser Antilles, a colony sharing more than language and parliamentary democracy with its British mother country. ‘Calypso is our culture, We’ll be proud of it forever’. Writing at the start of the new year, Edgecombe was paraphrasing a part of the chorus line from the New Year Calypso King’s winning entry, the Mighty Arrow (1994) with his calypso ‘Montserrat English’ (‘Dis is Montserrat culture/We’ll be proud of it forever’) to make the point that calypso defines and draws people together, that calypso is an intrinsic part of the people’s Montserrat culture.
