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Parang: Trinidad's Spanish Christmas music

For six weeks every year, the radio in Trinidad fills with Spanish-language string-band music — a survival of the island's period under Spanish rule.

A Spanish season in an English-speaking country

Trinidad was a Spanish colony for nearly three centuries before the British took it at the end of the eighteenth century, and Spanish-speaking settlers from Venezuela continued arriving long afterwards — the mainland is only a few miles across the Gulf of Paria.

What survives most visibly from that period is parang: string-band music sung in Spanish, performed at Christmas, in a country where almost nobody speaks Spanish as a first language. Many singers learn the words phonetically, which purists complain about and which has not slowed it down at all.

The name comes from the Spanish parranda, roughly a spree or a serenading party, and that describes the original practice: groups travelling house to house through the night, singing at each door and being fed and given drink at every stop.

The music

A parang band is built on strings — cuatro, guitar, mandolin, sometimes violin — with box bass, maracas known locally as chac-chac, and occasionally a scraper. The cuatro, a small four-stringed instrument from Venezuela, is central.

The repertoire is mostly religious and follows the Nativity story in sequence: the annunciation, the journey, the birth, the shepherds, the wise men. There are set forms — the aguinaldo, the serenal that opens a night's singing, the joropo and the manzanare among the secular dance forms.

The singing is full-voiced and in harmony, and the tempo is faster than most people expect of Christmas music. It is not contemplative. It is party music that happens to be about the Nativity.

Soca parang

In the second half of the twentieth century parang met the island's other traditions and produced soca parang — parang instrumentation and Christmas themes over a soca rhythm, usually in English or a mixture, and frequently comic.

Purists were unimpressed. The audience was not, and soca parang now dominates commercial Christmas radio in Trinidad, with new releases every year competing for the season in the same way soca competes for Carnival.

Traditional parang continues alongside it, with its own competitions and a National Parang Association, and the two coexist without much difficulty — much as calypso and soca do.

The season

Parang season runs roughly from the end of October through to early January, peaking in December. It is genuinely a season rather than a background: Trinidadian radio shifts substantially toward it, parang bands play at events throughout, and the paranderos still go house to house in some communities.

Because the tradition is strongest in areas with historic Spanish and Venezuelan settlement — Lopinot, Arima, Paramin and the northern range villages — those places become destinations during the season.

Tobago, Grenada and Venezuela's coastal communities have related traditions, and Guyanese and Vincentian stations carry parang at Christmas too.

How to listen

Tune into a Trinidadian station in December and parang is unavoidable — it is one of the clearest examples anywhere of a radio dial being reshaped by a calendar. Traditional bands and soca parang sit side by side, and the competitions are covered on air.

Outside the season it largely disappears, which makes it one of the more strictly seasonal musics in the Caribbean. If you are curious, the window is late October to early January. The stations below carry it live.

Trinidad and Tobago stations (30)

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