For a few weeks of the year, you can get a slice of Trinidad in Jamaica. Through the annual Jamaica Carnival, an event that replicates Carnival in Trinidad while still integrating aspects of Jamaican culture, soca heads, carnival chasers, and feterans from around the world make their way to the island in April for unlimited bouts of wining, jabbing, and revelry. For one night Sabina Park, in the nation’s capital of Kingston, was host to the Carnival Thursday festivities, an amalgamation of soca, dancehall, and a generous open bar. TRIBE: Ignite , a travelling party borne of Trinidadian mas camp TRIBE —the group of people who design and create theme-based costumes for Carnival—had arranged a Caribbean music lover’s dream lineup that included Kes the Band , Machel Montano , Ding Dong , Alison Hinds , and Nailah Blackman. She came out in bold, red blazer, with electrifyingly contagious energy, performing hits from the current soca season, one of them being " Baila Mami. "

Nailah sees her mom’s history as an artist as inspiring. At just 14 years old, Abbi Blackman won the National Calypso Queen contest with her record " Young and Moving On ," except no one knew she was that young. She eagerly snuck into the contest by telling organizers she was much older but had a desire to showcase her talent. That she did and has had a successful music career since. Nailah chuckles while sharing, as this is one of her favorite memories of her mother.

The Blackman name is well-known in soca circles: Calypsonian powerhouse Abbi Blackman (Nailah’s mother), soca artist Marge Blackman (Nailah’s aunt), and producer Isaac Blackman (Nailah’s uncle), are just few names on a long list of heavy-hitters that she shares a bloodline with. It’s all in the family for the Blackmans, and that’s evident in the music they produce with and amongst one another. For example, the artist explains that her aunt teamed up with consecutive three-time International Soca Monarch winner, Aaron " Voice " St. Louis, to create " Full of Vibe ," which was produced by her uncle. The family works collaboratively and their dynamic shines through by way of how lovingly she speaks about the relationship she has with her mom. "She’d always want to write my song before I wrote my own songs. She would make my outfits, write my [music], teach me my performance and [was] basically my life coach in general," she laughs. "There are so many moments. I just don’t know where to choose from but she was just so involved in everything that I did music-wise."

Though Blackman has years of experience as an artist, and given that fact that she’s (literally) soca royalty, her foray into the limelight was by way of a collaborative single for 2017 Carnival, " Workout ," which was made in part with lead singer Kees Dieffenthaller, of Kes the Band. In 2016, Dieffenthaller saw the artist performing her single "Cigarettes" on YouTube (the video has since been deleted) and they both created "Workout" to be entered into last year’s International Soca Monarch: Trinidad’s annual, highly competitive music showcase where winners receive a cash prize, the title of best soca record, bragging rights, and a high probability of a successful music career. Though the record moved on to the finals, it did not win, but afforded the artist an immense amount of exposure and opportunities. Blackman, who was only 19 at the time, had gone through a major shift in a short amount of time, having worked with various producers when she was 15, meeting her current manager/producer, Anson Soverall , at 17, and then performing during Trinidad Carnival alongside a soca behemoth like Kes two years later. "It was only late 2016 when I was like, 'I really wanna do sokah,' and that was when 'Workout' was born the following year for carnival. Everything changed cause...I used to perform a lot in wine bars and in very intimate settings in Trinidad,” she shares with me. For Blackman, it’s beyond just doing soca. It’s about coming to terms with a destiny she feels compelled to fulfill.

On the day that we speak, she landed in Tampa Bay to perform at the city’s Carnival and had flown from New York where she performed on a cruise alongside fellow T&T artist, Patrice Roberts. Tampa will be a brief stop before she makes her way back into the Caribbean and then to California to perform at Hollywood Carnival and to continue the rest of her tour. It’s been non-stop for the artist, especially with the success of "Workout," but she has a larger goal in mind, and it’s one that’s informed by her late grandfather, Calypsonian legend and father of soca/sokah, Garfield "Lord Shorty" Blackman, affectionately known as Ras Shorty I.

Blackman shares her family history with me. Historically, Trinidad and Tobago’s primary demographics have been comprised of Afro and Indo-folk. Her grandfather, who was the son of an Afro-Barbadian and Indo-African woman, grew up in Lengua Village, a town in southern Trinidad populated by many Indo-Trinidadians, who were descendants of the country’s indentured laborers. Her grandfather had always been involved in music: "He had been thinking about sokah music from before he even knew that it was sokah music, for so long." Though he felt connected to his Afro and Indo roots, he still felt isolated because of the huge racial divide in the country and in his immediate predominantly Indo community. In addition, Jamaican reggae music as well as soul and R&B from the U.S began to popularize among the country’s young people. While he was successful with Calypso, he felt like there was still a better way of engaging and empowering Trinbago’s youth and thought music would be a good way to draw on sounds from the two cultural groups. Nailah’s tone changes, likely adopting the same frustrations her grandfather took on, as she shares the visions he had for the genre. Explaining her grandfather’s desire for unity, she says, “He wanted to make a music that was completely Trinidad and he called it 'sokah' because it is the soul of calypso, and the '-kah' represented 'divine' in Hindi. K-A-H, that’s how it was spelled. So he called it sokah: S-O-K-A-H." An interview with Lord Shorty in 1997 also mentions the etymology of the word, '-kah' being the first letter of the Indian alphabet.

Nailah says he made music for about nine years until he came out with his 1974 album, Endless Vibrations. This body of work is considered a canon in soca music, with Shorty’s fusion of calypso and Indian music and traditional instruments. "That was when he first launched sokah as a sound, as a genre and he explained the breakdown of everything in that album." She sings a line from the single that shares the same name of the album, "'Change the musical structure make the soca sweeter jouvert morning_..._ ' He was basically telling everybody to get on this new thing. This is the new calypso.”

Of course this was met with some resistance. But when another artist, Lord Kitchener came out with his 1976 hit, "Sugar Bum Bum," there was a shift. According to Blackman, once Kitchener started to do it, everyone did as well. There has been much tension about the origins of the genre, and many folks discredit the work of Lord Shorty, but in a 1979 interview in Carnival Magazine, he is quoted saying, "I came up with the name [sokah]. I invented [sokah]. And I never spelt it s-o-c-a. It was s-o-k-a-h to reflect the East Indian influence." Nailah shares that in an interview, a music journalist misspelled the word as s-o-c-a, which is what it is contemporarily referred to as. An additional explanation indicated that its etymology is from the s-o of the word 'soul' and the 'c-a' of the word 'calypso,' from the understanding that "soca is the soul of calypso."