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Artists
Emeline Michel
Emeline Michel, born in Gonaïves, is a Haitian singer who has been called "The Joni Mitchell of Haiti." Her songs merge native Haitian compas and rara music with jazz, pop, bossa nova, and samba. She is a well accomplished dancer, versatile vocalist, songwriter and producer. She sang a version of Jimmy Cliff's "Many Rivers to Cross" at Hope for Haiti Now: A Global Benefit for Earthquake Relief.
Carole Demesmin
Today, Carole Demesmin is an older lady singer and a powerful Vodou priestess, or a manbo. She now mostly sits and only sometimes comments instead of being the cultural doer that she once was. She tells her memories. Before it, she was a socially and politically conscious young woman in bright colors on a vinyl cover. She sang Vodou culture songs that some in Haiti, who preferred to mimic European culture, shunned. She also sang songs about the tribulations of the country’s poor. She was a singer seen on television and heard on the radio who time and time again fed Haitian life with her a love of selfhood. As a token of their gratitude, Haitians have declared her a legend.
Carole Demesmin was at first a middle class Haitian girl from Leogane who had moved to the United States who knew very little if nothing at all about Vodou. Leogane is a city known for its Rara bands; pre-columbian culture marching bands heavily steeped in Vodou that still exist today. Regardless, she was not aware of it. She learned of Vodou in the United States, as many Haitians do. Inspired, she went on to release the majestic album Carole Maroule in 1979.
Carole Demesmin – Carole Maroule
She moved back to Haiti in the early 1980’s and became one of the great singers of her people’s struggle, a people who would overthrow a dictator in 1986, a people who would be massacred by its own army in the early 1990’s and who would know a bittersweet version of democracy that would send it into a disastrous tailspin that still affects Haiti today. As things turned sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worst, she became a priestess of Vodou religion and released the albums Min Rara, Lawouze, and Kongayiti-Afrika, all to signify that we Haitians are Africans in the New World who want respect.
Her commitment to Vodou was as correct as it is beautifully expressed. No human being should be obliged to believe in a specific God or in one God. We human beings have not been successful at upholding that as a human right. Christian institutions, descendants of Roman Christianity and always close to political and social power, has done a lot of damage to one’s ability to practice another religion with dignity. It forced the polytheist slaves of the Western Hemisphere into an odd form of secrecy; they could not practice their faith in public and so their descendants have taken on similar postures. Her commitment did wonders for Haitian culture and for Haitian song. It imposed itself in public, gladly, without remorse.
Courtesy: Adolf Alzuphar
Toto Bissainthe
Toto Bissainthe (2, April 1934– 4, June 1994) was a Haitian actress and singer known for her innovative blend of traditional Vodou and rural themes and music with contemporary lyricism and arrangements.[1][2] Born in Cap-Haïtien in 1934, she left Haiti at an early age to pursue her acting studies abroad. Her career started in theatre with the company Les Griots, of which she was a founding member in 1956. Les Griots was at the vanguard of négritude-inspired cultural institutions in France, and was the first African theatre company in Paris and the first to perform of Jean Genet's play "Les Nègres". She also worked with playwright Samuel Beckett, played a co-starring role in Raoul Peck's "L'homme sur les quais", and worked with other directors such as Roger Blin, and performed in several films.
With a groundbreaking performance in 1973 at La vieille grille in Paris, Toto Bissainthe established herself as singer-songwriter-composer, stunning the audience with her soul-stirring renditions of original compositions that paid homage to the lives, struggles, miseries and spirituality of working class and rural Haitians.
The singer and actress Toto Bissainthe was recognized by many as a champion of Haitian music abroad.
An artist in exile, Toto Bissainthe will be unable to return to the Haiti that so inspired her until the departure of Jean-Claude Duvalier in 1986. However, the multiple disappointments of the unending democratic transition and political infighting would forever embitter the outspoken artist, who had long dreamed of a return to help rebuild her motherland. Saddened by Haiti's social and political degradation, Toto Bissainthe's health would enter a downward spiral ending with her death from liver damage on June 4, 1994. The cause was cirrhosis, her family said.