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27, 2026: For seven decades, Slinger Francisco, aka The Mighty Sparrow, gave the Caribbean its sharpest wit – songs about power, politics, sex and everyday island life, delivered with a grin that made even his most biting lines feel like a party.

The Mighty Sparrow did not simply sing calypso.

He became one of its defining voices, from the moment “Jean and Dinah” helped propel him to his first Calypso King title in 1956 to a catalogue that would eventually stretch across hundreds of recordings and reshape how the world heard Trinidad and Tobago.

But according to his family, Sparrow’s final chapter was not written in calypso at all.

Before his death Sunday, Sept.

27, 2026, in New York at the age of 91, the man born in Grand Roy, Grenada, and raised into legend in Trinidad had, in his family’s words, “made his election sure by giving his heart to the Most High, Jesus Christ,” and was baptized into the Seventh-day Adventist faith.

It is a quiet coda for a man whose art was rarely quiet.

The performer who spent a lifetime commenting on the world around him spent his final days turning inward.

He passed away peacefully in New York after a brief illness, surrounded by loved ones.

His daughter, Karen Francisco, announced his death on behalf of the family.

“It is with great sadness that we announce the passing of Trinidad and Tobago’s Calypso icon, Slinger Francisco, known to the world as ‘The Mighty Sparrow,’” she said.

The family also revealed that in his final days Sparrow was baptized into the Seventh-day Adventist faith, a deeply personal spiritual turn at the close of an extraordinarily public life.

He is remembered by his family as “a husband, father, grandfather, great-grandfather, life partner and friend.” Born in 1935 in Grand Roy, Grenada, Francisco was still an infant when his family relocated to Trinidad, the island whose Carnival culture and calypso tents would shape the rest of his life.

He took the name “Sparrow” for a quickness — of wit, tongue and instinct — that would become inseparable from his performances.

By the time he broke through in the 1950s with songs such as “Jean and Dinah,” he had already announced himself as one of the sharpest voices calypso had produced.

What followed was one....