Lord Flea

In 1949, he earned himself a year-long engagement after he had performed in the talent competitions held at the Sugar Hill Club.

Flea recorded and released records with the assistance of local business men, Alec Durie and Ken Khouri.

Early singles featuring Flea's vocal performances were attributed to "The Blue Mountain Caroleers" or "The Jamaican Calypsonians".

Bill Saxon, owner of 'Club Calypso' on Biscayne Boulevard in Miami, traveled to Jamaica in order to search out an 'authentic sound' for his Florida venue.

Saxon offered a residency lasting from two to six months, with the proviso that those artists that wished to apply for the gig, must have previously recorded some music.

Lord Flea & his Calypsonians soon received a contract and began to perform for six months in America.

The music produced by Lord Flea and other artists from the Caribbean islands was marketed as 'calypso' but Flea's style was actually known as 'mento'.

With his band The Calypsonians, Flea toured America throughout the late 1950s, and released an album on the Capitol label.

The band also performed in two calypso-related films.

Thomas was born in Kingston, Jamaica, and began his career in entertainment at local dancehalls such as the "Adastra Gardens" and "Success".

The late 1950s calypso craze extended to the film world.

In a 1957 interview for the UK Calypso Star magazine, Lord Flea explained: "In Jamaica, we call our music 'mento' until very recently. Today, 'calypso' is beginning to be used for all kinds of West Indian music. This is because it's become so commercialized there. Some people like to think of West Indians as carefree natives who work and sing and play and laugh their lives away. But this isn't so. Most of the people there are hard working folks, and many of them are smart business men. If the tourists want "calypso", that's what we sell them."

Members of the Calypsonians assumed colorful stage-names.

Besides Lord Flea himself, the band adopted such memorable pseudonyms as Count Slick, Count Spoon, and Prince Charles.

The Calypsonians' bassist was called Fish Ray — an early exponent of the "walking bass" technique.

Lord Flea and his Calypsonians appeared in the edition of 11 February 1957 of Life magazine, in an article entitled "U.S. Tourists Rush to the Caribbean".

The piece contained a photograph of Lord Flea performing at the Jamaican Room.

Fellow bandmate Pork Chops can be seen in the picture alongside Flea, with the Calypsonians' bongo-player sat high upon a large barrel.

That year also saw the band featured in more musically-orientated US magazines such as Hep Cat's Review and Calypso, as well as the UK's first issue of Calypso Star.

On 9 February 1957 Lord Flea & His Calypsonians appeared on The Perry Como Show where they performed "Shake Shake Sonora" and "Where Did The Naughty Little Flea Go?"

Little Flea's version of "Shake Shake Sonora" (later to be covered by Harry Belafonte) was reviewed in February 1957 by Billboard, which stated that: "Flea has a dynamic drive.."

and that the single "could put many to shame."

The review also added that Lord Flea & His Calypsonians produced "attention-grabbing sides [which] can stir action at all levels."

Rising star Lord Flea and his band appeared in two films released in 1957.

The Calypsonians feature in Calypso Joe, and they perform several numbers in Bop Girl Goes Calypso, a film that has been pronounced "dead on arrival"

and criticized as a "painful United Artists mistake",

in which a psychologist studying "Mass Hysteria and the Popular Singer" persuades the "Bop Girl" of the title to embrace the "calypso" style, and to abandon her previous rock'n'roll singing technique.

The band played ceaselessly in America throughout the calypso craze.

The band performed at Eden Roc Hotel for six months, and in Las Vegas at the Dunes, "Flea chalked up new house records, as he [had] been doing the past few months in New York's Jamaica Room."

Unfortunately for the Caribbean mento/calypso artists, as Time magazine had already noted in March 1957:

"Financially, American imitators are doing better than such authentic calypso singers as The Duke of Iron, or Lord Flea and His Calypsonians (Lord Fish Ray, Count Spoon, et al), whose cleaned-up version of the nocturnal wanderings of a flea is also a nightclub favorite."

Lord Flea was the stage name of Norman Byfield Thomas (1931/32 or 1933/34 – 18 May 1959), a Jamaican mento musician credited with "helping start the calypso craze in U.S."

Suffering from Hodgkin's Disease, Lord Flea was admitted to Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami in 1959.

According to daughter Kathie Way-Giddarie:

"Each evening during his hospital stay, he would play music for the doctors, nurses and the patients on the isolation ward."

On 18 May 1959 (at the age of either 24 or 28), Lord Flea died.

Thomas's subsequent funeral procession was, at the time, the longest ever seen in Miami-Dade County.

In "Mister Give Me Ma Rent", the Lord tells of a problem landlady who is "..too rude – in my affairs she likes to intrude.."

The song goes on to depict financial woes and poor accommodation common to many Jamaicans of the time:

In his "Calypso Be Bop", Flea name-checks his Bebop heroes.