Depending on your age, the name Francine Edwards or the sobriquet Signing Francine might not mean much.
But her unique voice might be known to you, as her song “Parang, Parang” has become a staple of sorts at Christmas time.
Yesterday, just a week away from Christmas, the period Singining Francine’s voice is most heard, the calypso fraternity lost yet another of its stalwarts.
The four-time Calypso Queen passed away just two months shy of her 80th birthday.
Born in 1943, she described herself as being born into the calypso art form and had been performing ever since she was a child.
Considered by many in the cultural fraternity as a leading ambassador of calypso, Francine was yesterday remembered by the president of the Trinbago Unified Calypsonians Organisation (TUCO), Ainsley King, as “the voice of women”.
A feminist of her time, Francine, in her song “A Call to Women”, urged women of 1970s T&T to embrace the calypso artform as a means of self-expression. In it, she sings in her iconic voice of the success of calypso music and the attempts of foreign acts to “capitalise”.
In what might be interpreted by feminists of today as an attempt to ensure representation, and include the perspectives of Trinbagonian women in order to enrich the genre, she sang “... In order to do our best come now let we compromise, what I mean is we want to crown a calypso queen.”
Her reach, however, went beyond calypso.
At the height of each Christmas season, Francine’s many parang hits, including “Hurray, Hurrah” and “Ay Ay Maria” can be heard on local airwaves as it reminds Trinbagonians of the true reason for the festivities and celebrations.
Francine’s parang album “Christmas is Love”, which fused the rhythms of calypso, soca and parang, also positioned her as one of the pioneers of the soca parang genre, a term that was coined only three years prior.
Describing Francine as an “indomitable force”, King extended condolences to her loved ones, friends and family.
