Wilmoth Houdini acquired the title Calypso King of New York during the 1930s and 1940s, largely because he staged numerous calypso events throughout the city, although details of his early life remain difficult to confirm. Most accounts list his birth as November 25, 1895, in Port of Spain, Trinidad, while a few shift the year to 1896; a 1939 New Yorker profile by Joseph Mitchell, however, records Houdini’s own assertion that he entered the world in Brooklyn in 1902 and that his family relocated to Trinidad when he was two. His original name appears to have been Frederick Wilmoth Hendricks, yet Mitchell noted that the passport Houdini carried at the time listed Edgar Leon Sinclair.
What stands out clearly is that he spent the greater part of his childhood in Trinidad and later adopted Houdini as his stage name. Under that name he served in 1916 as chantwell, or lead singer, for the African Millionaires, a twenty-five-member street carnival troupe based on the island. During the middle years of the decade he sailed on ocean freighters that took him to ports across North and South America, Europe, and Africa, finally settling in New York around 1927. Almost at once he began cutting calypso sides with local jazz and string ensembles, among them Gerald Clark’s Night Owls, one result being the album Harlem Seen Through Calypso Eyes issued by Decca Records in 1940.
Houdini proved extraordinarily productive, reportedly writing thousands of songs—many of them improvised on the spot—and he issued well over a hundred 78-rpm discs between 1928 and 1940. A number he had recorded in 1939, “He Had It Coming,” was reworked by Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Jordan under the title “Stone Cold Dead in the Market” in 1946; the track held the top spot on the R&B charts for five weeks and reached number seven on the pop charts. The hit brought him widespread notice, which he channeled into organizing a series of calypso concerts and festivals around New York; within the city’s Caribbean population these efforts earned him considerable respect, even though calypsonians back in Trinidad frequently attacked him in song as an outsider, prompting his pointed 1934 reply “Declaration of War.”
Houdini died in New York on August 6, 1977, and whether or not he was born there he lived the bulk of his life in the city. Brunswick and Folklyric each assembled nearly identical collections of the 1928–1940 78s, releasing them as Songs of Trinidad and Calypso Classics from Trinidad respectively. Arhoolie Records reissued the Folklyric set on LP in 1984 and, in 1993, brought the material out on CD as Poor But Ambitious, appending eight additional tracks Houdini had cut in the mid-1940s.
