Singing the News

In a plush Panama City cocktail lounge the chitchat hushed as a scrawny 21-year-old singer stepped up, caught the beat from a guitar and chanted mournfully:

I read de news, I am so puzzled, I am confused About an ex-pilot and now celebrity Whose name is Gerry Lester Murphy.

Rupert ("Kontiki") Allen, Panama's calypso king, went on to give his customers a rhymed rundown on the latest theories about Pilot Murphy's mysterious disappearance in the Dominican Republic (TIME, Feb. 25). Kontiki was staying on top of his profession last week by wryly relating the vagaries and outrages of Caribbean power politics.

Like most calypso singers, Kontiki learned his trade on the streets, where, as one of 16 children in a poor family, he spent most of his time. Unlike most, he devoted himself from the start strictly to politics rather than other topical matters, praising democrats and making fun of strongmen. During the 1952 Panamanian elections he made his professional breakthrough with a glowing ditty about a democrat of sorts, the late President Jose Antonio ("Chichi") Remon. The lyrics, shunning excess modesty, called Remon "the saviour of Panama"; Remon used it as a campaign jingle, and after he won the election sent Kontiki a check for $250. For any rising young calypso singer, the next step was clear. Then only 16, Kontiki strolled into a local ginmill one night and, in one of the haphazard contests that decide calypso rank, sang down the reigning monarch, one King Cobra. As King Cobra faded into oblivion, Kontiki rose, working his way up to better and costlier bars.

Most of his repertory changes as rapidly as political news, and in true calypso style he composes most of the songs on the spot. His current favorites are the Murphy song and a long, sad ballad mourning the recent, unsuccessful uprising in Havana

(General Batista, No, No, No!). But his customers will not let one old Kontiki song die, even though its subject, President Anastasio ("Tacho") Somoza of Nicaragua, is no longer in the news--and no longer around. Telling the story of Somoza's assassination, it begins:

A guy asked de dictator if he 'ad any

farm

'E said 'e 'ad on'y one--It was Nicaragua.

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