If the ideas for great works of art are often fished from the unconscious with only the

sheerest threads of memory, Shadow’s “Pay the Devil” was retrieved with a memory of a
memory.
“I went to Barbados with Spektakula last year and a man I met say I should sing the
song I was to sing in ’75,” says Winston Bailey. “I couldn’t even remember his name, but
he mentioned ‘Katie’ brown or ‘Ebby’ Gray and he reminded me of the rhythm: pak-pak
pak pak-pak.”
Katie Brown or Ebby Gray used to play in a devil band that made the young Winston
Bailey thrill with fear at Carnival.
“I cyar remember what we said about it but it was a song I was to do a long time ago
about a scary masquerader,” he explains.
Long ago in Tobago,
The Carnival wasnot so
Was plenty jab jab and devil
They came down to Les Coteaux
They came from Culloden, horns on their head
One name is Drixen, eyes always red
One Abasynia, a hero of mine
Portraying Lucifer with a fork in his hand
Pak-pak pak pak-pak
Carnival, explains Shadow, has always been one nof calypso’s many topics, and “pay
the Devil” is a tribute to one of the masqueraders of Shadow’s Tobago childhood, a man
named Abasynia. “People say I is a devil worshipper – they crazy! They not listening to
lyrics,” he says. “I describe the scene. You could see the picture – it’s about Carnival long
ago. Abasynia was theatre. It’s a great man I celebrating there.”
Mama, I hear a rumble
Abasynia coming down, O Lawd!
The children begin to tremble
Abasynia come in town
The crowd start to scatter
Place getting warm
They fall in the gutter
They don’t care a damn
Man start to free up
Spirits are high
Man start to jump up
Like they learning to fly
Pak-pak pak pak-pak
To an adult, and how much more so to a child, devil mas did indeed possess a
frightening power, and to a Tobagonian child there was no more terrifying mas than the
devil portrayed by one Nichols, also known as Abasynia, a tall, dark man with only two
teeth in front.
 With four or five others Abasynia played devil mas. He wore only black – this was no
pretty mas. Chained to one or two restraining imps, he’d rear at the crowd, opening his
mouth so wide as if he’d swallow every one, and they’d scatter in fear like little birds.
Other bands would part for Abasynia and his demonic retinue to pass changing “Pay the
Devil, pay the Devil!” to a furious tattoo drummed on a biscuit pan by an imp: pak-pak
pak pak-pak…
Still, if the calypso is a tribute to long-time Carnivall, devil mas is also a very Shadow
theme, the closeness to the spirit would that recurs in his music over and over. So he’s
sung about the jumbies in Toco who made him sing calypso, about the bassman from hell,
about himself in hell waiting until when he could have them judges jumping, no stopping.
Don’t’mess with his head because he’ll wait for you in hell. This is a millennial vision of
Africans in the New World dealing with violent retribution and divine justice. But their
agent isn’t so much God as the Devil, who is the one to watch out for. The great
anthropologist Melville Herskovits pointed out long ago in his study The Myth of the
Negro Past, “This Devil is far from the fallen angel of European dogma.” Rather, Afro-
Americans immediately after emancipation believed in “the avenger who presides over
the terrors of hell and holds the souls of the damned to their penalties.” Or, as Shadow
puts it:
So if you bad, don’t die
Walk around and cry
The Devil down dey
You will have to pay
Pay the devil
This sense of righteousness has about it a sweep far grander than calypso’s normal
concerns about this or that corrupt Minister, and is more akin to the apocalyptic message
of reggae. Hence the natural companion to “Pay the Devil” is Shadow’s other 1994
masterpiece:
Poverty is Hell
And the angels are in paradise
Driving in their limousine
Where everything is nice and clean
Jesus explained in Matthew 19.23-26, "it is hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom
of heaven. Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than
for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God." And shadow inverts the metaphor because
in the temporal world everything is topsy-turvy and it is the poor who are in agony. “We
used to be poor and we’re heading back into it. That’s where we come from, poverty, and
if you forget that you don’t know where you going. It have fellas drinking from the canal
– that’s poverty. It’s around, and people supposed to know what it’s like, not just pretend
everything is all right. It’s hell: you cyar find food to eat.
Africa is also in Shadow’s rhythms, his emphasis on the bass guitar as a modern
incarnation of the African drum, or as they are called in Tobago, the tambrin, which is a
flat, goatskin drum used at weddings to dance jigs and reels and invoke the ancestors.
“That tambrin rhythm of goatskin drum I was exposed to all the time,” he says, “Tambrin
music and violin – more drum than violin – that stay in me, that’s the feeling that grows,
the roots. In Les Coteaux that’s the home of tambrin music.”
 It’s also the home of many African legends, the faith healers and Gang-Gang Sarah
the African witch, and of Abasynia. so when all other claypsonians in the early 1970s had
six sheets of music Shadow had seven, the additional one for the bass guitar. The result
was the seminal “Bassman.” The centrality of Shadow’s rhythm in “Pay the Devil” is
indicated by the fact that most people call the tune “Pak-pak” although its correct name is
“Long Time Carnival (Pay the Devil):
I used to love the rhythm
When I hear them coming down, O Lawd
O what a sweet vibration
I want to p lay the drum
But I cyar fine the drummer
And I have to go now…
The emphasis on heavy bass rhythms makes Shadow more a progenitor of soca than
anyone else, Shorty included. For the main ingredient that distinguishes soca from
calypso isn’t any particular rhythm: there are many different rhythms in soca, such as the
Baptist rhythms in Superblue’s music, or the Indian rhythms in Shorty’s. What they all
hold in common is the dominance of the bass lines which separated soca from calypso
and which makes Shadow’s music particularly in tune with today’s youth, who have been
so influenced by reggae and dub. It was part of the early-1970s shift in popular music,
including rock, reggae and disco.
“Only the youths know the sweetness they feel in it,” he says optimistically about the
youths’ preference for dub and rap. “But in the Trini version I see so much that is Trini
that something must come out of it. everybody rapping today but they’ll get back to
singing.
“African music start from drumming. We use bass but it’s the same drumming, and
the youths have gone back into rhythm. They’ve emptied the music now, but eventually
they’ll start putting things into it to get it sweeter and if it gets sweet, then great things
might come out of it.”
It’s an optimism which allowed Shadow to transcend the profound disappointments of
his career. So after his failure to win the 1974 crown with “Bassman” and “I Come out to
Play,” for all his threats of satanic retribution, his artistic genius produced within a few
months one of his most defiant tunes:
I believe in the stars and the dark night
I believe in the sun and the day light
I believe in the little children
I believe in the world and its problems
But then again, even in that optimism you could see the survivalism of the African in
the New World.