Soca music, Carnival anthems and Caribbean party classics

The Road March: Trinidad's ultimate soca title

Plenty of competitions crown soca songs, but only one title is decided by the people on the road. The Road March goes to the song played most often as bands cross the judging points during Trinidad Carnival — tabulated by the Trinbago Unified Calypsonians' Organisation (TUCO). No judges' taste, no panel: if the masqueraders' trucks keep your song spinning at the stage, you win the March.

Photo: Jean-Marc / Jo BeLo, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The record chase: Kitchener vs Machel

For nearly fifty years the all-time mark belonged to Lord Kitchener, the Grandmaster, who collected eleven Road March titles between the 1940s and 1976. Machel Montano — winner as far back as 1997 with “Big Truck” — spent a career closing the gap. Carnival 2025 came down to a duel: Machel's “Pardy” against Bunji Garlin's “Carry It,” decided by a handful of plays — 267 to 253 — drawing Machel level with Kitchener at eleven. In 2026, “Encore” made it back-to-back — 171 plays to Voice’s “Cyah Behave” on 127, with Bunji Garlin’s “Road Man” third on 97 — a 12th title that carried Machel past Kitchener to stand alone at the top of the list.

Reading the winners list

The roll below is a history of Trinidad music in miniature: King Radio and Lion in the calypso era; Kitchener and Sparrow trading blows; the war years with no Carnival at all; the famous 1955 oddity when a visiting German children's choir's tune was the road's most-played song; Calypso Rose breaking through as the first woman to win the title in 1977; Superblue's 1990s reign; and the modern Machel era. The list is SocaHits' founding document — the site began as this page.

Every Road March winner

Winners as listed in TUCO's Road March results and contemporary reports. No titles were awarded for the war years 1942–45 or the cancelled Carnivals of 2021–22.