IN HIS opinion piece in the Guardian last Monday, Lester Holloway, this newspaper’s editor, pointed out that Queen Elizabeth II was “calypso-loving”.  

I am not a royal watcher, but it got me reflecting on the role music has played in the relationship of Commonwealth to Crown and vice versa. 

Pathé News, arguably the principal audiovisual chronicler of 20^th century British imperialism, produced a series of newsreels of the Caribbean tour that Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip took in February 1966, which included a visit to Trinidad and Tobago, the home of calypso.  

In the T&T video, entitled, “Queen in West Indies”, my Auntie Joyce and Uncle Courtney Nicholls are the camera lens’ subjects at the 1:09 mark. She is the lady in the red dress and he the bespectacled gentleman with whom she is conversing. 

The royal visit took place a fortnight ahead of Carnival, that quintessentially Trinidadian tradition, and the footage also captures a mini-Carnival staged for the monarchs’ entertainment, complete with masterful steel bands, dazzling floats, and expressively costumed performers known as “mas players”.

A patrician-sounding voiceover on the newsreel states, as Mr Holloway wrote, that the Queen warmed to this gift of sound and sight: “The Queen remarked, ‘If this is only a preview, the Carnival itself must be fabulous!’”.   

Carnival is about inverting reality, something the Queen apparently got. She “was thoroughly amused by a character portraying Henry the Eighth”, the voiceover tells us.  

Going by these and other accounts, perhaps Her Majesty would have wanted Hackney Carnival to go ahead as scheduled last Sunday. Perhaps, Hackney Council would have been well-advised to see, or rather hear, things from her, not their own, perspective.  

By the same token, I would think that the Queen’s funeral service would incorporate musical traditions beyond the classical, ecclesiastical and military compositions that are programmed, music the Queen herself professed to like, music representative of the vast Commonwealth whose proponents prefer to regard as melodious over cacophonous.  

I am not proposing a scenario in which soca lyrics like “Wine behind the big truck” accompany the royal family, or anyone’s family, as they walk behind their matriarch’s casket.  Although, mind you, when Bob Marley died, his sons Stephen and Ziggy danced at his funeral, while their grandmother, Cedella Booker, Bob’s mum, cheered.  

Rituals of mourning run the gamut from expressions of anger to zeal. And in a so-called commonwealth of nations comprised of 2.5 billion people populating a quarter of the world’s land mass, to say that cultural approaches differ is an understatement.

Why wouldn’t a subdued steelpan rendition of the spiritual “Swing Low Sweet Chariot”, like it is performed by this group of students in Canada, the Commonwealth’s largest member state, not be considered appropriate? Prince Harry understood the song’s sanctity and advocated for its appropriate use. 

One of Buckingham Palace’s music directors has said that the musical selections for the Queen’s funeral will be “bourne out of a golden thread of history, heritage, and tradition”. Point taken. In 1873, an a cappella version of “Swing Low Sweet Chariot” was performed at Buckingham Palace for Queen Victoria, at her behest, by the world renowned Fisk Jubilee Singers, an all-African American vocal ensemble. Certainly, this qualifies as a thread of history. 

Returning to the “Queen in West Indies” report, one of the songs played at the Carnival preview was “Ting Tang” by Aldwyn Roberts, better known by his stage name of Lord Kitchener, who’d been crowned Calypso King.  

Ting tang, darling 

The Queen and the Duke coming, ah-ha 

Ting tang, darling 

Everybody rejoicing, oh-ho 

Man, it’s true 

They say they go jump-up, too 

And join in the bacchanal 

For this Carnival. 

Lord Kitchener had returned to his native Trinidad after a successful career in the UK performing and producing music that was regularly broadcast on the BBC. He’d arrived in England in 1948 aboard the Empire Windrush. In now-historic footage, the same Pathé News recorded Kitchener singing “London is the Place for Me” as he prepared to disembark the Windrush at Tilbury docks. “Will you sing for us?” the reporter asked him. 

Historically, the only occasions on which what the sociologist Paul Gilroy terms “Black Atlantic musics” have been performed for the British monarchy and state were celebratory. But, steelpan and other forms of music emerging from the Black African diaspora have more than one mood setting. They are attuned, and appropriate, to every occasion.

If the monarchy wishes to show how not tone deaf it is to the thunderous calls to reconfigure whatever relationship it has to the formerly colonized realms, it should incorporate sounds from throughout the Commonwealth into the Queen’s funeral service. In so doing, it would acknowledge a world of sound that we have always known and lived in.  

When my Auntie Joyce passed in 2014 at the age of 88, bagpipes were played at her funeral in Trinidad. Why? Because she loved them. They took her back to her student days in Scotland.  

So, to all queens and kings, lords and ladies – the calypso-loving one named Elizabeth, and the one in masquerade as Henry VIII whom she so appreciated, the one named Kitchener and the one who was my beloved Auntie Joyce – I bid adieu. 

Nicholas Boston is a professor of media sociology at Lehman College of the City University of New York (CUNY), and a member of the steering committee of the Black British Voices Project. Follow him on Twitter @DrNickBoston