Rum and chutney

It's a safe bet you could drive from New York to California on two-lane roads and listen to songs about whiskey for a week and never hear the same song twice – Whiskey Before Breakfast, Whiskey in a Jar, Evil Whiskey Woman, Drinkin' Rye Whiskey, and on and on. Sad songs, cheerful songs, country songs, hard rock songs, and a surplus of tunes about loose women and skanky bars.

A trip with a mix tape of American songs about rum and rum drinks won't even get you from your home to the nearest Wal-Mart. If you don't count the 1979 Pina Colada Song -- and you shouldn't, because the lyrics are beyond appalling ("If you like Pina Coladas, And getting caught in the rain. If you're not into yoga, If you have half-a-brain....") – the number of memorable songs about rum comes to precisely one: Rum and Coca-Cola the Andrews Sisters hit that shot to the top of the charts in 1944.

I devote the a chapter of And a Bottle of Rum to the cultural, economic, and political forces that cleared the path for this song’s rise to stardom. The gist of the history is this: the song was an adaptation of a Trinidadian ballad, swiped by an American comedian visiting an island Army base during WWII, then sent into the stratosphere by American singers.

But scratch the surface in Trinidad today, and you’ll find a whole slew of rum songs, many recent variations of a popular hybrid Subcontinent-goes-Soca style called “chutney.” (About forty percent of the population of Trinidad is of Indian descent.) An article on the subject recently ran in the Trinidad and Tobago Express under the headline “Rum and chutney the latest Carnival drink.” (Having made cocktails using rum and raspberry preserves recently, my first thought was, “Well, this sounds interesting!” Then I clicked and remembered. oh, yeah, chutney, the music.)

The trend kicked off about five years ago, but songs celebrating rum — or “celebrating” rum — continue to crop up on the island, with a couple of new songs released for the current carnival season. Here are some of the lyrics, which I don’t think will be licensed anytime soon by major spirits corporations for use in advertising campaigns:

Hey ... listen mister Shankar,
you sayin' I is a drunkard,
you doh want me to marry yuh daughter.
But yuh doin' me a favour,
cause I ain't want yuh daughter
she too damn ugly anyway.
More rum for me,
more rum for me,
more rum for me,
more rum for me.

And this:

Rum kill mih mother,
rum kill mih father,
rum kill mih whole family.
Rum kill mih brother,
rum kill mih sister,
now it want to come and kill me.
But I doh really care what people say...
oh, ah drinking today and ah drinking forever...

And more:

Yuh could bring it in a bottle,
yuh could bring it in a flask.
You could send it in a cup,
you could bring it in a glass.
Ah want mih rum in de morning.
Ah want mih rum in de evening.

Trinidad is clearly a culture that appreciates rum.

A confession: I know I gave short shrift to rap in my inventory of American music above. Rappers appear to like rum, although not as much as Hennessy. But, seriously, some rapper somewhere surely must be able to improve upon rhyming “Bacardi” and “party”: