Roy Cape

Jocelyne Guilbault is Professor of Music at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Governing Sound: The Cultural Politics of Trinidad's Carnival Musics and Zouk: World Music in the West Indies.Roy Cape (born in Trinidad in 1942) is an internationally renowned calypso and soca musician and bandleader. He has toured widely, played on hundreds of recordings, and released eight albums with his band Roy Cape All Stars.

“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)

• List of Illustrations ixAcknowledgments xiNotes on the Text xvIntroduction 11. For the Love of Music: Up from the Panyards and at the Orphanage 232. Working as a Bandsman 423. Listening to Roy Sounding 764. Leading the Band 995. Remembering with Pictures 1356. Working with Roy: Musicians and Friends Speak 1837. Circulation: Summarizing a Career 207Afterword. Writing Voices 229Notes 233Select Discography 259References 261About the Companion CD 277Index 279