ALL SALTFISH SWEET 😋 — When Sparrow Took Joker Devine’s Words and Made Them His Own
ALL SALTFISH SWEET 😋
When Sparrow Took Joker Devine’s Words and Made Them His Own
A GRACE NOTES REFLECTION
WATCH: Grace Notes revisits the Mighty Sparrow’s performance of Saltfish, written by Winsford “Joker” Devine.
It’s Carnival time again.
In the words of the great Lord Laro, those few words are enough to start something stirring in a Trinbagonian. In Irie Tempo, Laro travels musically through the great celebrations and spectacles of the world before bringing us home to Trinidad. He has seen Carnival in Rio, mas in Toronto, fiesta in Mexico and the bacchanal of New Orleans Mardi Gras, but still comes home to Trinidad Carnival as the spectacle none of them can beat.
And then comes the comparison that has stayed with me. Laro invokes New York’s actors, Hollywood’s designers and Broadway’s producers, and places alongside them the designers, actors and producers who create Trinidad Carnival. His verdict, in the language that lands so naturally in the Trini ear, is essentially this: Broadway eh have nothing on them at all.
There is something wonderfully audacious in that observation, but something true to the spirit of Carnival too. The mas is not simply costume. It is theatre, movement, character, design, music, spectacle and storytelling happening around you in real time. And somehow that thought came back to me while watching the Mighty Sparrow perform Saltfish, because what Sparrow is doing here is certainly more than standing at a microphone singing a calypso.
Since my recent SPARROW DED remembrance, many of us from Trinidad and Tobago, New York City, across the Caribbean and wherever Sparrow’s music touched have been having our own little nostalgia-recall moments. We have been playing the music again, digging up old YouTube performances, sending clips to one another and remembering not simply the songs, but where we were, who was around us and who in our families somehow claimed particular Sparrow songs as their own.
Music does that. Sometimes you think you have gone looking for a song and discover that you have gone looking for people.
For me, Sparrow can take me straight back to Daddy, who could suddenly break out into some nondescript Sparrow melody — da-da-da, doo-doo-doo — and somehow we knew exactly what he was doing. My brother Michael could give you Drunk and Disorderly in one breath and Salvation in the next, which, come to think of it, is quite a theological journey for one man to make without stopping for refreshments.
Then there was The Slave. I have no documented stage performance to attach to the picture that lives in my head, so this is purely my own conjecture, but I could always imagine Sparrow acting that song with his whole body — struggling, contorting, flailing as though feeling the whip and brutality of the slave master himself. That is how completely Sparrow could inhabit material for me. He did not seem to stand outside a song and deliver it. Somehow, he climbed inside.
Which brings me, rather deliciously, to Saltfish.
Dominic Kallipersad shared this performance of Sparrow singing it, and there I went down another Sparrow rabbit hole. I had heard the song before, of course, but watching the performance now, with the distance of years and perhaps a more attentive ear, I found myself fascinated by what Sparrow was actually doing with it. Before he gets anywhere near properly singing the song, he has already turned Saltfish into theatre.
He tells us people are always minding his business and wanting to know his favourite song, especially West Indians who, as he jokes, start “talking Yankee” even before they get the green card. From there begins what can only be described as Professor Sparrow’s international dissertation on Saltfish.
We learn that saltfish is a West Indian delicacy and that not every woman in the world knows how to prepare it properly for her man. A West Indian woman, however, apparently knows exactly what she is doing, and according to Professor Sparrow, when she prepares it properly the man may very well end up licking the bowl.
Now, if at this point you still believe the gentleman is conducting a culinary demonstration, Grace cannot help you.
Sparrow carries his Saltfish first to England, where he objects to the British presumption surrounding “English cod.” The joke grows because, according to him, once an Englishman gets a proper taste of Caribbean Saltfish, he has a curious tendency to come to the Caribbean and marry it. We have barely recovered from that when Sparrow takes us off to Venezuela, discovers bacalao, decides it sounds suspiciously close to bacchanal, encounters two beautiful women in Caracas and suddenly discovers whatever Spanish the occasion requires.
His Spanish may not have survived examination by the Real Academia Española, but it certainly accomplished Sparrow’s immediate objectives.
Then comes the terrible news: mucho dinero for bacalao. Well. Sparrow may have loved Saltfish, but apparently there were limits.
From Venezuela he moves through Dominica, St. Lucia, Martinique and Guadeloupe, playing with language, accents, romance and appetite until the Caribbean itself becomes part of the joke. By the time he finally invites the audience into the chorus, the song has already been seasoned with so much Sparrow that it feels less like something he is performing than something that actually happened to him.
And that was where my curiosity got me into trouble.
Because among the conversations that surface whenever we revisit the work of a giant like Sparrow is the question of authorship. With such an enormous catalogue associated with one performer, how much did he write himself? How much came through collaboration? Who were the writers behind some of those songs that became so inseparable from Sparrow that we simply assumed they were Sparrow?
So I went looking.
And look who I found.
Winsford “Joker” Devine.
My, my, my.
Trinidad and Tobago’s official cultural record identifies Winsford “Joker” Devine as the writer of Saltfish. Devine was one of our extraordinary calypso composers, credited with more than 500 compositions over his career and with writing memorable songs performed by Sparrow, including Saltfish, Capitalism Gone Mad, Survival and Miss Mary. Contemporary reporting following Devine’s death also identifies Marajhin, Saltfish and Phillip My Dear among his compositions associated with Sparrow.
My, my, my.
That discovery did not take one ounce away from Sparrow for me. Quite the opposite. It made me go back and watch the performance again because now I could separate two remarkable acts of creativity that popular memory had allowed to merge.
Joker Devine could write the metaphor. Sparrow could make you believe the metaphor happened to him.
And there, for me, is the marvel of interpretation.
When Sparrow got hold of Saltfish, he did not merely sing what was written. He embellished it with his own theatricality, pleasure, innuendo and indulgence. He gave the words facial expressions and gestures, changed voices and accents, wandered geographically from England to Venezuela and up through the islands, flirted, teased, paused and let the audience tell him through its laughter just how far he could take the next line.
And he could take it far, because come now: if you thought salted cod was the sole subject of Saltfish, Sparrow was not responsible for preserving your innocence.
In his hands the fish acquires decidedly female dimensions. Taste becomes desire, appetite becomes another kind of appetite, eating becomes indulgence, aroma becomes attraction and the preparation of Saltfish by a woman for her man begins to sound considerably less like a recipe you would find in the Naparima Cookbook. The anatomy of Saltfish becomes saucy, juicy, tasty and irresistible, and Sparrow manages the whole thing with that wonderful Caribbean device of saying everything while technically saying nothing at all.
That is part of what makes the performance so culturally familiar to me. The double entendre does not need an explanatory footnote because the audience is already in on it. It is in the eyebrow, the pause, the inflection, the steups, the suggestion and that peculiar Trinbagonian linguistic inheritance where one perfectly respectable sentence can carry another entirely disreputable sentence underneath it.
Everybody understands, and nobody needs to call a meeting.
Through it all sits Joker Devine’s gloriously uncomplicated proposition: all Saltfish sweet. Not necessarily clean, mind you. Sparrow clears that up later. But sweet.
By the extended ending, Sparrow has gone beyond the central conceit and turned himself into part of the joke. His bald head, his health, his previous operation, his age and his virility are all available for public consumption. Even his own body is fair game. That is Sparrow performing Sparrow — the comedian and raconteur operating alongside the calypsonian, knowing precisely how to stretch a suggestive idea until an audience is waiting for the next wicked turn.
And this is why revisiting these performances after Sparrow’s passing has become more than nostalgia for me. We knew the songs, but perhaps some of us did not always stop to distinguish the architecture underneath them: the writers, composers, arrangers and musicians alongside the extraordinary man at the microphone who made so much of that work permanently associated with his own personality.
So today, in deconstructing Saltfish, I find myself honoring two men: Winsford “Joker” Devine, because the words matter and the writer deserves his name attached to what he created, and Slinger Francisco, the Mighty Sparrow, because interpretation matters too.
Joker put Saltfish on the page. Sparrow took it to England, Venezuela and through the Caribbean; tasted it, smelled it, flirted with it, turned bacalao into bacchanal, wrapped it in accents and languages, and convinced an entire audience that he possessed considerable personal expertise on the subject.
And then sent everybody home singing about fish.
Or so we could tell ourselves.
Because if Sparrow taught us anything in this performance, perhaps it is that Saltfish is in the eye — or maybe the appetite — of the beholder. And after all these years, that mischievous declaration remains:
My, my, my.
Sparrow, you were something else.
— Grace Notes.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
This Grace Notes reflection distinguishes the documented authorship of Saltfish from Sparrow’s interpretive performance of it. Trinidad and Tobago cultural sources identify Winsford “Joker” Devine as the composer/songwriter of Saltfish. My discussion of Sparrow’s spoken embellishments, theatrical delivery, characterization and interaction with the audience concerns the performance shown above; it does not assign authorship of undocumented improvised passages where the historical record does not establish it.
VIDEO & COMMENTARY NOTE
The embedded video is presented in connection with original commentary, criticism, cultural discussion and historical reflection. Third-party audiovisual material remains the property of its respective rights holders. Fair use is determined according to the particular facts and circumstances of a use; the inclusion of this notice does not itself establish or guarantee fair-use status.
ENDNOTES & RESOURCES
1. Winsford “Joker” Devine — Ministry of Culture and Community Development, Trinidad & Tobago.
The Ministry’s biographical profile describes Devine as a prolific songwriter who composed more than 500 calypsos and specifically identifies Saltfish, Capitalism Gone Mad, Survival and Miss Mary among songs he wrote for the Mighty Sparrow.
Read the official Winsford Devine profile →
2. “Calypso mourns Winsford Devine, shaper of the craft” — Trinidad and Tobago Newsday.
Newsday’s 2021 remembrance identifies Devine as one of Trinidad and Tobago’s most prolific songwriters and names Sparrow’s Marajhin, Saltfish and Phillip My Dear among his memorable compositions.
Read the Newsday article →
3. “Calypso’s most prolific composer” — Trinidad and Tobago Newsday Archives.
This 2007 profile explores Devine’s songwriting career and his creative relationship with Sparrow, including Devine’s own recollection of the importance of Sparrow in bringing his work to wider audiences.
Read the archival profile →
4. Lord Laro — “Irie Tempo.”
Lyric reference for the Carnival passage discussed in this essay, including Laro’s comparison of Trinidad Carnival’s designers, actors and producers with New York, Hollywood and Broadway.
View the “Irie Tempo” lyric reference →
5. Mighty Sparrow — “Saltfish” | Grace Notes Commentary.
The video performance and commentary at the center of this Grace Notes reflection.
Watch on YouTube →
6. Mighty Sparrow cultural archive — Trinidad & Tobago Ministry of Culture.
The Ministry describes Slinger Francisco, the Mighty Sparrow, as one of Trinidad and Tobago’s great performers and documents the preservation of his memorabilia and cultural legacy through its heritage collection.
Explore “Treasures from the Hideaway” →
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