Chances are that unless you’re an old movie buff, you’ve never heard of Sir Lancelot. Beginning in 1940, however, and for the next 16 years until Harry Belafonte came along, he was the most popular calypso singer in the world and a singing star in the United States. Belafonte himself has described Sir Lancelot as a major influence on his own work and career, and as his inspiration.
Born Lancelot Victor Edward Pinard in Cumuto, North Trinidad, the son of a government official, he began singing at the age of six in a one-hour recital. By the time he was finished with high school, his voice had matured into a perfect tenor instrument, but music didn’t seem to be available to him as a career choice – rather, his father sent him to New York to study medicine. By sheer chance, he was heard singing and invited to try a two-week engagement at the Village Vanguard, which turned into a year-long booking. In 1941, he went out west to play engagements at colleges in California and Oregon, and following a concert in Los Angeles, Sir Lancelot was contracted to make his first screen appearance, in the Pat O’Brien/Janet Blair vehicle Two Yanks in Trinidad. This appearance, in turn, led to his being booked on tours of Mexico, South America, and the Caribbean.
His first credited film appearance was in the atmospheric Val Lewton chiller “I Walked with a Zombie”, where his songs provided ironic commentary on the action of the movie. He later played a dramatic role in Lewton’s “The Ghost Ship” and “Curse of the Cat People”; “Eve Knew Her Apples”, starring Ann Miller, “To Have and Have Not” with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, and “Brute Force” starring Burt Lancaster. He was well-known enough by then to play characters simply known as “Sir Lancelot” in pictures as different as the comedy “Linda Be Good” and “The Unknown Terror”.
Sir Lancelot’s singing appearances on radio and television, on shows hosted by Ray Anthony, Ed Sullivan, and Dinah Shore (where he sang the praises of sponsors Ford, Elgin watches, Coca-Cola, and Borden’s Milk, and often got more fan mail than Shore herself) planted the seeds of the calypso boom that led the way to Belafonte’s rise to fame at the end of the ’50s. In 1955, he left the United States for an extended tour of Europe and the Middle East, but returned to Hollywood three years later to appear in “The Buccaneer”, a big-budget widescreen historical drama starring Yul Brynner and directed by Anthony Quinn. He continued singing and recording, and made occasional television appearances as late as 1968, when he turned up in a non-singing role in an episode of The Andy Griffith Show, and continued to record at least through 1973.
The album “Calypso of the West Indies and Ballads of the Caribbean” is a Caribbean music treasure, 14 songs from Trinidad, Puerto Rico, Barbados, Haiti, Cuba, and Martinique, sung in Sir Lancelot’s pleasing, rich tenor voice, in high spirits and boundless joy, backed by everything from a simple guitar to a steel band. Recorded between 1946 and 1973, in surprisingly good sound (only 1946’s “Ugly Woman” – track 12 – sounds compressed, transferred off of a 78 rpm disc). The 1958 tracks (tracks 1 – 9, recorded in Hollywood) feature the Mac Niles Caribe Carnival Band, Steel Drummers, and Singers, and the repertory includes the originals “Jump in the Line” and “Tied-Tongue Mopsy,” classics like “Run Joe,” “Matilda,” and “Jamaica Farewell”. Amazingly, the 1973 vintage track, “Double Indemnity” (track 10 – as charming and delightful as the movie of that name is dark and depressing), shows Lancelot’s voice in astonishingly good shape, and hardly different at all from its 1946 incarnation.
The Legendary Sir Lancelot – Calypso of the West Indies and Ballads of the Caribbean
(192 kbps, no cover art included)
The festival is renowned for introducing to a national audience a number of performers who went on to become major stars, most notably Joan Baez by her appearance as an unannounced guest of Bob Gibson in 1959, and Bob Dylan, in turn a guest of Baez at the 1963 festival. Not strictly limited to folk performers, in the 1960s Johnny Cash, Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf all performed. The festival also included many musicians of the pre-World War II country blues who figured as influences to the American folk music revival of the 1950s and 1960s where artists “lost” since the 1940s were “rediscovered.”
Zero G Sound 