Singing to her own tune

TWO SONGS best defined Denyse Plummer. The first was 2001’s Nah Leaving, a well-known paean to TT.

The second was Nah Leaving’s surprise sequel, 2019’s Ah Cyah Leave Him, in which Ms Plummer’s love for the patriarch transformed into a love for the Father Almighty, her Creator.

Both neatly embody the complexity of this artist’s courage, conviction and unique contribution to our culture.

Born on November 9, 1953, in St James, just opposite Crosby’s Music Centre, Ms Plummer, who has died at 69, came of age at a time when few women would have forged careers as calypsonians. Her mother, Barbara Ramirez, worked as a telephone operator and a cashier, and her father, Dudley “Buntin” Plummer, a man of Caucasian descent, was a salesman.

By the age of nine, Ms Plummer’s voice was discovered when she became a soloist for the Holy Name Convent choir. She went on to a steady career performing pop songs and ballads at weddings, bars and hotels.

But when Len “Boogsie” Sharpe asked her to sing his composition for the 1986 Carnival season, Ms Plummer balked somewhat.

“Calypso requires a completely different vocal, mental and physical attitude to do it well,” she wrote in her 2015 memoir, The Crossover.

However, that was just a part of the problem. She would also be perceived as a Caucasian woman performing an art form forged centuries ago by enslaved people as a weapon against plantation rule.

Yet Ms Plummer, ever mindful of her country’s mixed heritage, embraced the challenge, launching into a career that, in the end, lasted decades and saw her become a household name, performing many well-loved tunes such as Woman is Boss and Together Right Here, a song that anticipated the cosmopolitan notes of Nah Leaving, penned by Christophe Grant.

Her performance of the latter in 2001’s Dimanche Gras, in which she moved across the stage decked in gold amid a sea of fire-breathing devils, moko jumbies and dancers, is the definition of Trinidadian spectacle.

“Is here where conceive me, is here I go dead,” Ms Plummer sang that night, to rapturous applause. Fifteen years earlier, a crowd at Skinner Park had thrown toilet paper at her on her debut. The subtext of her crowning as Calypso Monarch at the Queen’s Park Savannah with Nah Leaving was her perseverance.

If Ms Plummer showed courage in joining the calypso world, she also showed it by leaving, in 2015, to embrace born-again Christian ideals. That move, made very publicly, no doubt alienated people in both the calypso fraternity and in Christian circles, with many born-again Christians being sceptical of calypso.

And yet it was simply another instance of Ms Plummer dancing, or rather singing, to her own tune.