Clinton St. Quarterly, Vol. 7 No. 3 | Fall 1985 (Seattle) /// Issue 13 of 24 /// Master# 61 of 73

By Lynn Darroch drive and the obsession, the steel drum Ellie M annette and Steel Drum’s Freedom Song I Drawing by Stephen Leflar t is Carnival time in Trinidad. Steel bands begin to assemble at dawn, and as the tropical sun rises, they hit the streets with as many as 150 drummers each. Following them in the singing, dancing parade are hundreds of their neighborhood supporters. At the Panorama in Port of Spain, Trinidad’s capital and largest city, these tremendous steel orchestras ring out into the night in a marvelously coordinated display of powerfully resonant classical music and calypsos. Less than 50 years ago, the steel drum was born in a spontaneous outburst of percussive Carnival parading. Today it is the national symbol and prominently displayed on the flag. The development of this ringing voice of the people, from trash bin to precision virtuoso instrument, has been a battle waged by individuals, banging and listening to what was growing from their hands and ears, in ghetto pan yards. One of those men was Ellie Mannette. he steel drum has become the biggest thing in the Caribbean now. It’s on the flag, on the money, on the stamps....But at one time there was a stigma against it, because it was from the gutter. The boys who k \ really have created it and who have done w 4' something significant ? & were the poor boys. And f in Trinidad especially, we have a society where, if you haven’t gone to college, you are nobody: if you haven’t got a friend who is a doctor or a lawyer, you are nobody. And I was an outcast because I had a ■ chance for a college education and I did not take it. The » Trinidadian had that kind of Up attitude against the art form. Right up to the present time, they will not put steel bands in the schools. If I didn 't have the endeavor and the would not be what it is today. Because I was working against the odds. I did not know what I was doing, number one; the craft was something new to me, I was searching for things that develop in my mind. And then I had the police against, me, because as soon as I bang too much in the backyard and I keep too much noise, the people will say it's a nuisance, they call the cops, the cops will walk in and take all my drums and throw them away. I had to get drums from scratch and start all over again, try my best to come along. And then everybody puts you down. "A boy like you who had a pretty good education, you play these sets of garbage cans?” • The steel drum is the first completely new orchestral instrument since the saxophone was invented in 1843. Its bright, piercing tones are the voice of modern Trinidad, a polyglot mixture of races and customs left in the wake of European colonists, the slaves they brought from Africa, and the indentured East Indian workers who labored on the plantations after Emancipation—the remnants of a get-rich-quick immigrant society that floundered on this southernmost outcrop of the Golden Antilles. United only by the 16 Clinton St. Quarterly

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