rhythmic common denominator of its African descendants, this ad hoc society produced the steel drum. A people’s music is a mirror of their culture, and in the polished surfaces of the steel drum we can find the struggle and the ringing hammer of freedom that gave voice to a people. The story of the development of the steel drum is the story of the emergence of an authentic West Indian culture in Trinidad, a culture that was devised literally from the junkyard of European civilization. Ellie Mannette lived that story. Birth of the Steel Drum 'rinidad’s pre-Lenten Carnival, originally introduced by French settlers, became over time a celebration by Afro- Trinidadians in which thousands paraded in the streets for.two days and nights in spontaneous singing, drumming and dancing. With island-wide strikes and labor unrest in the ‘30s, however, the British colonial authorities issued another of their periodic bans on African skin drums, and the island’s young men took up lengths of bamboo to make their rhythm. With the large sticks bored out and pounded on the ground for a bass tone, and smaller lengths producing other pitches when struck together, the “bamboo-tamboo” bands dominated Carnival celebrations until 1934, when the government outlawed them too. Born in 1926 and raised in Woodbrook, a lower middle-class Creole neighborhood in Port of Spain, Ellie Mannette paraded with the bamboo-tamboo bands when he was only seven years old, and he was on the streets for Carnival in 1935. The boys wanted a parade, he remembers in lilting West Indian cadences, but they had nothing to parade with. So they pick up garbage cans, whatever they can find in the form of tin bins to make rhythm. And they went everywhere singing what we call “La Vie” and banging on these cans and parading. From the time those bins were collected, the steel drum was born. Each year at Carnival, from 1935 to 1941, the celebrants further refined those tin drums, using paint cans and other five-gallon containers and pushing the bottoms up in a convex shape with small holes that, when struck with a sawed-off broom handle, could produce a few notes. There were a number of bands like this across town, Mannette recalls, because from the time the guys pick up the garbage cans and start playing, all the little guys around town who had been playing the bamboo, theyjumped right in line. Not in organized bands: there was no melody to it, there was no pattern of rhythm to it, it was just the sound and the singing and the marching in the streets. But there was no way you could control a sound. So I looked at the drum—I was then about 14or15—and I decided to put the bottom down and bump my notes out. And I could get distinct tones. I tried to get a scale, but I couldn ’t get all of it. So a guy come during that period by name of Winston Simon. He got a big name for playing the first melody ever on a steel can. That was 1941. Trinidad was the assembly port for convoys of oil tankers bound for Europe and North Africa, 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 attitude against the art form. Right up to the present time, they will not put steel bands in the schools.” German U-boats lurked offshore. Blackouts were in force, but the spirit that drove those Carnival drummers continued to burn. In the competitive society of Trinidad—where the question is ‘who’s the best,’ and where, according to Trinidad’s expatriate novelist V.S. Naipaul, “everything was left to the caprices of the individual,” and everyone admired “the sharp character, who, like the sixteenth century picaroon...survives and triumphs by his wits”—the street drummers worked to improve their instruments, even though Carnival was banned until WWII ended in 1945. In our backyards, during the daytime, people tried to experiment on these drums, and it started growing, Mannette continues. The government allowed us to have little “Scouting for Talent"programs, where you could contest with your steel drum. In 1946, they were having a contest, and I say, “I’m going to build a big drum to take part in that contest." I was working then in a machine shop, and every afternoon I was working on that drum, but no one knew what I was going to do. I never had musical training, but I had a good ear for hearing notes. I had a feel for wanting to hear things I knew was not there, but I had it in my mind. I just could not get the equivalent of notes in the kind of song I wanted to hear on the small drums, so I decided I want to make a big drum, add more notes and make it larger in size so it’s going to have more power. I did not tune it by any particular pitch, I’d just sing a note in my mind and do it from ear, and I got 14 notes in, and I come to find out that I can play these particular songs with that instrument. When my turn came, I came on stage with my big drum in a bag, and I sit on this chair and I took the drum out and set it on my knee, and played a tune called “Brahms’ Lullaby” and Schubert’s “Ave Maria. ” On a small island, news travels rapidly, and with newspapers announcing the event and Mannette appearing on a radio broadcast with his drum, hundred of people were soon crowding into his yard to see the first musical instrument fashioned from one of the many 55-gallon oil barrels that the U.S. military had discarded during the war. The British governor of the island offered the 20-year-old Mannette a scholarship to study music in England, but the lure of the pans proved stronger, and he remained in Port of Spain, where he had quit his job to devote all his time to the steel drum. It went on and on and all the other boys around the island jumped in line and everybody started experimenting on the big barrels and disregard completely all the small drums. So when Carnival came in ‘47, all the boys came out with the big pans onto the street. We cut the sides off short and hung them around our necks, and we played little melodies, and we sing along. The Road To “Respectability J ^ y 1948, after two years of universal suffrage and rising expectations produced strikes and civil disturbances throughout the island, Mannette had developed a second drum, lower in pitch than his original pan, and the other bands quickly picked it up too. The next year he built another, still lower in pitch, and with the addition of a new four-note bass instrument and a biscuit tin that Mannette had turned into a more resonant drum they called the “tune-boom,” the steel bands at Carnival in 1949 were using five distinct instruments. The early steel bands generated a lot of hostility from the middle class and the colonial authorities, however, who saw fights between the rival bands and their noisy celebrations as a menace to society. But by the end of the decade, prominent people were beginning to sense the social as well as artistic potential of the nascent steel bands, not only as an outlet for ghetto youth, which Carnival had always provided, but as a popular focus for the movement toward decolonization and eventual self-rule that had been building since the ‘30s. A new politics was growing, and it would carry the black middle class to power and result in Independence in 1962. As that nationalist movement emerged, the steel band began to gain respectability. The process was gradual and grudging, however, due primarily to the colonial legacy which devalued the local, Afro-West Indian culture, even in the minds of its progeny. The calypso, the truly indigenous music of the island, had always been a vehicle for social protest as well as a bouncing underpinning for Carnival parades, and although the steel drum’s first song was a calypso, the greatest compliment a steel bandsman could receive through the next two decades was, “He play the classics, mon!” So bands began forming across the nation, Mannette remembers. And the government felt, “Well, it is a new art form growing like crazy, and we should do something for the boys to give them some incentive. ” So they decided to start forming an all-star band to take part in the Festival of Britain, and we formed the Trinidad All-Star Percussion Orchestra, that we called TASPO. We formed that band in 1950, but we played chords at random, we don't know what we’re playing, the drums for that matter were all out of key from each other, they were just tuned from ear. So this guy came from Antigua [a nearby island], a police bandsman, and he trained, us. He said, “We have to have chromatic. ” And I say, “What is chromatic?” And he say, “Half-tones. ’’ And I say, “That means we have to build over all our drums. ” So I had to build most all of the drums for the Festival. When Mannette returned from that British tour in 1952, his head was full of new musical ideas, and he decided to scrap all the drums he had made and begin anew. Spending countless hours bent over the concave tops of the barrels, listening and banging with a small hammer, he developed another instrument, but still he wanted more sounds. By 1956, working steadily while living at his father’s or his sister’s house, he had built three more drums, all played in sets by that time in order to get more notes and enable the player to produce chords. By that time, with international oil companies refining Venezuelan crude on the island, the Shell Oil Company was sponsoring Mannette’s band, the Invaders, and he could earn a living building drums, keeping them in tune, and playing concerts. His band also began to make records, but the sound was not Clinton St. Quarterly 17
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