A self-respecting troubadour sings and rhymes about daily life in a town, with its sorrows, struggles and joys. And if that town is Cahuita, located in the southeast of Costa Rica, in the province of Limón, that troubadour is called a calypsonian. That’s Walter Ferguson, also known as “Segundo” and Mr. Gavitt, a calypsonian who made songs about everything and for everyone. He was nicknamed “The Father of Calypso” for a reason.
Walter Ferguson was born on May 7, 1919, in Guabito, a Panamanian border town. Still, he has always lived in Cahuita, a fishing town on the shores of the Caribbean Sea, in a region with strong Afro-Antillean roots. Cahuita is a land of calypso, like other towns around Limón, where a large part of Jamaican migrants arrived during the turn of the century, from the 19th to the 20th, to work mainly on banana plantations and on railways. Walter’s parents were part of that Jamaican wave that came to Cahuita looking for a job.
Like a sorcerer with a guitar, Mr. Gavitt turned small everyday conflicts into songs, from his ancestors’ stories to his people’s typical foods, even difficult times like those of monilia — a disease caused by a fungus in fruit trees such as cocoa. The song “Monilia” is the first thing he performed in Ferguson: El Último Trovador de Cahuita, a documentary by Audiovisuales UNED of Costa Rica in 1999. “Here you’re born with music you love,” he says there. “Some people don’t appreciate music because they aren’t born with it, but I was born with it and since I was little I’ve been playing it and singing it. I just love music.”
Walter used to say that he’d been singing practically since birth. He also said that no one taught him anything. Of course, there’s a history of what he learned. “Before I was seven years old, I began to play the dulzaìna,” he recalled in the film. “I also learned to play the harmonica. My older brother had a harmonica and I started playing it secretly. Then, when he found out, he bought me one, because he played it too. He knew I’d play the harmonica better than him, but he was a great guy and gave me one. Then I played the ukulele until I started playing the guitar. Little by little, I learned everything on my own.”
“I never had a ukulele and had to borrow one,” Walter says in the documentary. “I didn’t have a guitar either, but there was one in a shop. Its owner was a strict man, but he never stopped me from playing that guitar… He only warned me that if I broke a string, I would have to pay for it. Fifteen cents for a string was no problem. That’s how I started. Finally, the family from that same store called me to play in front of the customers who came there.”
A well-kept secret treasure in his hometown, Walter Ferguson was a myth of the Costa Rican Caribbean for a long time. He became known nationally and internationally when he was already quite old, in the early 2000s, exceeding 80 years of age. His late discovery turned him into a kind of Buena Vista Social Club of Calypso. He spent his final decades as a cult artist revered by many Latin American singer-songwriters, from Jorge Drexler to Perota Chingó — both of them, along with many other artists, honored him for his centenary in the 2019 compilation 100 Years of Calypso: Walter Ferguson.