The Nation’s Ricky Jordan remembers Carolyn “Tassa” Forde and comments on her contribution to calypso in Barbados. Tassa passed away last night at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital.
There are some people whom you never associate with sickness, far less death. Carolyn Tassa Forde was one of them.
Bubbly, thick in stature, and with a cute round face that lit up at the prospect of a good joke or a good calypso song.
Tassa liked good kaiso, and it seemed to have piqued her interest from a young age; for she was a junior in the commercial banking workforce – a few years out of Queen’s College – when she decided to join the Kingdom of Super Gladiators tent.
Her potential in the art form was immediately apparent. Her diction was good, phrasing was improving rapidly, and she had a voice.
What Tassa needed was the right song to take her past the semifinals and a few finals to give her that extra edge. She didn’t lack good writers such as Kid Site and Adonijah, but something always kept her from reaching the heights of some of her peers – even the trauma of forgetting her words once.
I was amazed in the late 90s when she informed me that she had been singing kaiso for over ten years.
The time had flown so fast and she had long moved from Gladiators to House of Soca. In recent years, Tassa has been singing in Eleanor Rice’s All Stars Tent.
Last year, her song about littering and garbage disposal in Barbados was one of her best and clearly one of the best in the competition.
Though she didn’t cop a high place at the Pic-O-De-Crop Finals at Kensington, it marked yet another solid contribution from an artiste who took her kaiso seriously.
On some occasions she would call and tell me she was getting a song or two arranged by Andy Williams; and in recent times she would post on Facebook her thoughts on the art form which she loved so much.
Tassa was also the life of any party. We once attended Jeff Neil’s broadcast class and at the end of the course, the group had dinner and a lime. The venue’s resident band struck up some soca, and guess who got to the dancefloor first?
She also knew everyone in the band, so they were further encouraged by her presence to lock into a sweet calypso-soca groove.
Hearing this week that she was ill did not make me consider death. I simply looked forward to her recovering and posting some witty comment on Facebook as usual over the next few days.
It was not to be, and now a young beautiful mother has left her son behind.
A voice has been silenced but will not be forgotten.
rickyjordan@nationnews.com
