Steelpan Ambassadors: The US Navy Steel Band, 1957–1999

By Andrew R. Martin

“Maybe you won't like steel band. It's possible. But it's been said that the Pied Piper had a steel band helping him on his famous visit to Hamelin.” When the US Navy distributed this press release, anxieties and tensions of the impending Cold War felt palpable. As President Eisenhower cast his gaze towards Russia, the American people cast their ears to the Atlantic South, infatuated with the international currents of Caribbean music. Today, steelbands have become a global phenomenon; yet, in 1957 the exotic sound and the unique image of the US Navy Steel Band was one-of-a-kind. Could calypso doom rock 'n' roll? Band founder Admiral Daniel V. Gallery thought so and envisioned his steelband knocking “rock 'n' roll and Elvis Presley into the ash can.”

From 1957 until their disbandment in 1999, the US Navy Steel Band performed over 20,000 concerts worldwide. In 1973, the band officially moved headquarters from Puerto Rico to New Orleans and found the city and annual Mardi Gras tradition an apt musical and cultural fit. The band brought a significant piece of Caribbean artistic capital—calypso and steelband music—to the American mainstream. Its impact on the growth and development of steelpan music in America is enormous.

Steelpan Ambassadors uncovers the lost history of the US Navy Steel Band and provides an in-depth study of its role in the development of the US military's public relations, its promotion of goodwill, its recruitment efforts after the Korean and Vietnam Wars, its musical and technological innovations, and its percussive propulsion of the American fascination with Latin and Caribbean music over the past century.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Release date: Jun 16, 2017
• ISBN: 9781496812414

Andrew R. Martin

Andrew R. Martin is professor of music at Inver Hills College. His research explores the global spread of steelpan and steelbands, American music, and popular and folk music and musicians since the Cold War. Since 2011, Martin has written a semi-regular newspaper column, "Pan Worldwide," for the Trinidad Guardian.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

Military Might, Melodious Music

Maybe you won’t like steelband. It’s possible. But it’s been said that the Pied Piper had a steelband helping him on his famous visit to Hamelin. In fact, the story goes, the Piper was only there as a colorful figurehead; something an obscure reporter dreamed up in order to play down the fact that the steelpans wouldn’t be invented for another few hundred years. The steelband really could have done it all by itself. Steelbands prove the tale each year at Carnival, in Trinidad, by drawing thousands of people through the streets in a rhythmic shuffle known as the tramp. Compared to this, what was the Pied Piper’s one night stand?

—US Navy Press Release (1957)¹

During the late 1950s, the anxieties and tensions of the impending Cold War were palpable. Locked in a high-stakes game of nuclear wits, President Eisenhower cast his gaze east toward a worthy Russian adversary. The American people, however, cast their ears to the Atlantic South as during this same time period American popular culture became attracted, and indeed infatuated, with the international currents of Caribbean music. Surprisingly, the popularity of Caribbean music in the United States during this period owes an enormous debt to the US Navy and their Trinidadian-style steelband. Currently (2016), the steelband sound has firmly asserted itself as the signifying musical voice of the Caribbean on a global scale. In the United States, steelbands have become increasingly popular in school, college, and university curriculums as part of larger diversity initiatives undertaken in public education over the past thirty years. The unmistakable sound of steelpan can also be heard at casinos and various major tourist attractions from Disney World (Florida) to Disneyland (California). However, in 1957 the exotic sound and unique image of the US Navy Steel Band was one of a kind and the US Navy, led by Admiral Daniel Gallery, was eager to explore the possibilities of the steelband and introduce their new public relations weapon to the world.

Over the course of its history, the US Navy Steel Band performed over 20,000 concerts worldwide and became an invaluable asset for the US military in promoting goodwill and reestablishing recruitment efforts following the Korean and Vietnam conflicts (1950s through the 1970s). Yet, following the band’s disbandment in the autumn of 1999 the US Navy Steel Band quickly faded from public consciousness. Despite directing my own steelband and having a research focus in Caribbean music, I was incredulous upon first encountering references to the US Navy Steel Band while conducting fieldwork in Trinidad and the United States in 2005. The US Navy had a steelband? How could a band with that many performances, backed by the US Navy no less, exist for forty-two years (1957 to 1999) with little lasting fanfare?

In order to answer these and many other questions this book aims to uncover the lost history of the US Navy Steel Band with an in-depth study of the band and its relationship within the scope of two overarching narratives: the development of post-WWII military public relations and recruiting, and American popular culture’s fascination with Latin and Caribbean music over the past century. However, before tackling such lofty ambitions several important items must first be addressed. For those uninitiated to the instrument, what is a steelpan? What is the steelband movement in Trinidad and Tobago, and how does it impact the development of steelbands in America? How does the American calypso craze of the late 1950s impact the formation of the US Navy Steel Band? Who was US Navy Steel Band founder Admiral Daniel Gallery?

The steelpan (sometimes called steel drum) is a tuned idiophone created out of 55-gallon oil barrels that originated on the Caribbean twin island nation of Trinidad and Tobago in the late 1930s. Ensembles of steelpans called steelbands are conceived of in families and feature a number of instrument variations ranging from high-pitch single steelpans to low-pitched multidrum sets of steelpans. Steelbands, like the string section of a western classical orchestra, are typically broken into four to six sections that collectively cover soprano, alto, tenor, and bass tonal ranges. The music and organization of steelbands descend directly from West African drumming and bamboo stomping ensembles known in Trinidad and Tobago as Tamboo Bamboo, which historically provided parade music for Afro-Trinidadians during Carnival. Because of laws imposed by British colonial overlords in the 1880s that explicitly banned drumming, practitioners of this cultural expression progressed from drums to performing Tamboo Bamboo by century’s end to performing their rhythmic music on paint cans, biscuit tins, and other types of metal containers before finally settling on oil drums sometime in the mid- to late 1930s.

Since the Roosevelt administration’s Destroyers for Bases Agreement in 1940 the United States had a presence in Trinidad.² In early 1941, however, Nazi U-boat sightings off the shores of Trinidad increased at an alarming rate as the Germans attempted to disrupt British shipping interests in the Caribbean Sea. The proximity of these U-boats to the Panama Canal greatly concerned the US military, which began increasing its presence in Trinidad, first with the US Army post at Ford Read (1941) and later Waller Field within Fort Read (also 1941) in central Trinidad and then the Chaguaramas base (on the northwestern tip of the island) in 1942. Discarded oil drums, prime material for making steelpans, were abundant around the bases and routinely filched by Trinidadian panmen.³ Upon the formation of the US Navy Steel Band in 1957, steelbands in Trinidad were relatively small and ranged from ten to fifty players. In comparison, in more recent times large Trinidadian steelbands can exceed one hundred players in preparation for the Panorama finals steelband competition each Carnival season. Building a steelpan is a laborious process comparable to that of building a violin or piano, and the method is particularly plagued by the idiosyncratic layout of notes and the temperamental composite of the metal playing surface. The raw steel oil drums must be cut and heated, the surfaces sunk (pounded) with large hammers, and individual notes outlined and pounded with a cold chisel or nail punch on the concave surface. Once outlined, the individual notes must be fine-tuned with surgical precision, a process made all the more complicated considering every note is isolated from the same singular piece of metal, and sympathetic vibrations from adjacent notes (and their overtones) affect one another.

The Trinidadian steelband climate of the 1940s and early 1950s was driven in part by rivalry and turf warfare among neighborhood groups of young men, and techniques for building steelpans were closely guarded secrets. Trinidadian steelpan pioneer Cliff Alexis, who built and tuned instruments for the US Navy Steel Band in the 1970s and 1980s, specifically hid his involvement in steelbands from his family. Alexis explained, A decent person would not have been caught dead with steel drum players, except during Carnival. Alexis was not interested in the turf warfare waged by the so-called bad johns found in Port of Spain’s tightknit neighborhoods yet he was well aware that navigating the ruffians of the movement was necessary in order to become immersed in learning the art and craft of building, tuning, and playing steelpan. I had to hang out with some pretty shady characters, but they had the skills.⁴

Poor and unemployed Trinidadians spent years toiling in panyards creating and refining the instrument, and it is this class of craftsman that is responsible for the lion’s share of innovations in steelpan construction building and tuning.⁵ Despite the efforts and dedication of poor and working-class peoples, steelpan and steelbands achieved an entirely new level of social and cultural importance in the early 1950s as the growing Trinidadian middle class adopted the art form and became increasingly involved in all areas of the steelband movement. Renowned steelpan pioneer Lennox Pierre notes that in the early days of the steelband movement (1930s–1940s), the middle and upper strata of Trinidadian society were staunchly opposed to the fighting and rivalry commonly associated with pannists and their supporters. They [pannists] were victims of constant Police harassment right up to the 1950s. According to the records, Police were summoned by decent and respectable citizens of society whenever steelbandsmen tried to play their instruments.⁶

The acceptance of steelbands among the Trinidadian middle class was greatly bolstered by two early agents, dance impresario Beryl McBurnie and the Trinidad All-Steel Percussion Orchestra. McBurnie is a major figure in the arts movement in Trinidad, and her name is synonymous with dance within the Caribbean and with Caribbean dance by the rest of the world. Trained in a wide variety of dance styles including ballet, modern dance, and local Caribbean and Trinidadian styles, McBurnie attended Columbia University in New York and studied dance with Martha Graham, Charles Weidman, and Katharine Dunham. McBurnie returned to Trinidad in 1945 to teach dance and foster the art form locally. In Trinidad, McBurnie founded the Little Carib Theatre in Port of Spain, which quickly became a center for dance in the Caribbean and an artistic institution for Trinidad as the country transitioned from colony to independence. The Little Carib Theatre is nestled into the Woodbrook neighborhood of Port of Spain, and here McBurnie hosted and performed for audiences of all types, including local neighborhood people, artists, key politicians, political dignitaries, and European royalty. Following the scheduled dance performances of the evening, McBurnie and her company made a tradition of dancing into the crowd and creating a fete atmosphere for the after party. For these after parties, McBurnie arranged for the Invaders Steel Orchestra and the Merry Makers Steel Orchestra to perform. McBurnie first used steelbands on stage in 1946, and the first instance of a steelband on stage at the Little Carib Theatre was in 1948 when the Invaders Steel Orchestra performed at one of the famous post-show fetes held at the Little Carib Theatre.⁷ These performances were important for the development of local arts and culture in Trinidad because it was here that the common folk rubbed shoulders with the elite and the steelband was able to display to the upper class its pure intentions as a cultural expression.⁸

The acceptance of steelband as a legitimate local art made considerable strides through the work of McBurnie; however, the Trinidad All-Steel Percussion Orchestra (TASPO) was, along with McBurnie, one of the key agents in establishing steelpan and steelbands as arguably the defining cultural marker of Trinidadians. TASPO was assembled for the purpose of performing for the Festival of Britain in 1951. The festival was to celebrate Britain itself, and entries from the current and former British colonies were included in an effort to celebrate the diverse scope of the British Empire. TASPO was led by Lieutenant Joseph Griffith, a Barbadian bandleader who brought a wealth of traditional musical knowledge to the steelband movement in Trinidad. Griffith demanded that the TASPO members use a rudimentary system of musical notation, and he further normalized many of the various steelpan sets used by the band members in order to more easily accommodate the performance of western classical art music.⁹ These efforts greatly increased the fluency of steelbands to adapt to all music styles and would have lasting musical implication on the future of the steelband movement.

TASPO was the first Trinidadian steelband to perform in Europe, and many in Trinidad saw the band as a major opportunity to promote the achievement and ingenuity of Trinidadians. The band was partially funded by the Trinidadian government with the rest of the funds raised via grassroots campaigning. The support of all class levels was integral to TASPO’s success, and an increasing strata of Trinidadian society took pride in the band as a representative of Trinidadian invention and ingenuity.¹⁰ Once in Britain, TASPO made an immediate impact; the participants were met with awe and wonder by audiences, and their performances were celebrated and eagerly chronicled in British newspapers. Like the British invasion is to rock’n’roll, so is TASPO to steelband. That is, in order for steelband to be taken seriously as an art form in Trinidad, it first needed to leave home and earn accolades elsewhere. As Stephen Stuempfle and C. L. R. James have noted previously, British artistic tastes were often more respected than local tastes, and Britain’s enthusiastic embrace of steelband via TASPO gave the local steelband movement in Trinidad a level of legitimacy it had yet to enjoy on its home soil.¹¹

As Trinidad and Tobago moved into the 1950s and the country was in the waning throws of colonialism, Trinidadians and other soon-to-be-former colonies such as Jamaica were self-identifying more and more as unique people with unique cultures eager to forge new identities. There was a marked effort by the middle class to embrace local arts, and participation in steelbands by college boys (middle-class, educated young men) was seen as a means for earning street credibility and hipness.¹² These middle-class college boy pannists learned skills from their lower-class counterparts but rarely joined the steelbands of the latter, instead choosing to form steelbands of their own. With the formation of these steelbands comprised of middle-class individuals, many of which still exist today, including Starlift, Silver Stars, and Dixieland, the entire steelband movement gained a degree of social credibility, and it became possible for someone interested in steelpan to participate in a steelband without the stigma of associating with the so-called hooligans of the street. Throughout the course of the 1950s, middle-class involvement in the steelband movement increased steadily. Many of these college boy pannists had formal musical training and brought a new element of innovation to the music and performance of steelbands in Trinidad throughout the decade. By the end of the 1950s it became clear that middle-class performers and advocates of steelband were now entrenched in the overall trajectory of the Trinidadian steelband scene and had a hand in shaping the musical and cultural development of the steelband movement.¹³

As steelbands gained popularity among the Trinidadian middle class, the social plight of lower-class pannists, steelband repertoire, and steelpan tuners (builders) themselves became political issues. These concerns included high unemployment and dilapidated road and sewer conditions in poor neighborhoods around Port of Spain such as Laventille, Belmont, and East Port of Spain, and the Afro-Trinidadian political party PNM (People’s National Movement) employed pannists to mobilize and campaign around them.¹⁴ Nevertheless, the politics of colonial Trinidad, so vitally important to the Trinidadian steelband movement, had little bearing on the formation of the US Navy Steel Band; to this end, the formation of the US Navy Steel Band had little to do with Trinidadian steelband movement. Early American steelband pioneers, such as Admiral Gallery, were well aware of the plight of the minority class of oppressed and disenfranchised Trinidadian pannist, yet, with the exception of Pete Seeger, most were unsympathetic, and in some cases dismissive, of the pannist’s cause. Admiral Gallery, for one, was concerned first and foremost with the best interests of the United States and, as an American diplomat of sorts, he refrained from entering political disputes with the British colonial authorities controlling and governing Trinidad and Tobago.

Admiral Gallery was a man of his time, brimming with American exceptionalism, and steelpan (and steelband music) was, in his estimation, a natural resource with endless potential that existed in an abstract vacuum free of cultural baggage or local/international politics. And, more important, he attempted to use steelpan in precisely this manner as an idea, sound, and image. Admiral Gallery’s steelband, the US Navy Steel Band, was unequivocally the first established American steelband comprised of American players to perform on a regular and continuous basis in the United States. The band was not, however, the first steelband to perform on American soil. Precisely when the first steelband appeared in the United States is not entirely certain, though it was likely sometime around 1950.¹⁵ Likewise, the exact moment of steelpan’s first hearing on United States soil is elusive. New York City, a global hub for information, commerce, and culture, is effectively the entry point of steelband music on its long road to integration into American culture. New York City is also a traditional entry point for many Caribbean immigrants as they settled in the United States during the twentieth century. The stress of adapting to new social norms paired with the cultural transition of these Afro-Caribbean immigrants from their former lives into Afro-Caribbean Americans did little to purge a desire for practicing their heritage and playing steelpan.

Early steelband activity in the United States is further tied to the movement and migration of calypso singers from the Caribbean to New York during the first half of the twentieth century. Many of these calypso singers began employing single steel pannists as sidemen for club and recording dates in New York as early as 1939.¹⁶ As a result of this arrangement, pioneering pannists owe much of their early success and visibility in America to the American calypso and exotica crazes that peaked in the mid-1950s. The direct connection between steelpan and the American calypso and exotica crazes resulted in a significant portion of steelpan music from the 1950s being facilitated and mediated exclusively via the hegemonic, though largely unwritten, guidelines of these short-lived American cultural crazes. This filtered version of calypso music and culture in the United States—one that is saturated with postwar American hegemonic visions of island bliss and happiness—represents a starkly different portrait of reality from the genre’s Trinidadian roots. Calypso was the latest in a long history of the American commercial music industry appropriating a foreign traditional music into something more palatable for American tastes, and the development of steelpan in the United States was, for better or worse, attached to the Americanized version of calypso, an attachment the instrument still battles to this day.

The socio-musical climate of the United States during the 1950s greatly impacted the formation and early reception of the US Navy Steel Band. Following the close of WWII America once again became a land brimming with optimism. The country was entering a period of economic prosperity, and for many baby-booming Americans this was a time of great social change that further witnessed significant cultural developments in the arts and music. The booming postwar economy padded the pockets of American consumers who by decade’s end eagerly spent their newfound disposable income upward of 300 billion dollars annually on nonessential consumer products.¹⁷ Facets of this growing wealth were reflected in the global expansion of the travel and tourist industry, which, thanks to the solidified route agreements of the bourgeoning airline industry, could connect patrons to the most remote areas of the world at a moment’s notice. In particular, tourists became increasingly interested in traveling to island destinations; Hawaii, French Polynesian, or the Canary Island, for example, which were previously only accessible by boat, prohibitively expensive to reach via airplane, or both.

Due to their proximity to the continental United States, the Caribbean Islands emerged in the 1950s as one of the premier exotic vacation destinations for many denizens of the growing American middle class.¹⁸ For this newly established socioeconomic demographic, the stresses of WWII were replaced by the taxing, though comparatively banal, associations of the nuclear family and grind of everyday suburban life. The geographical obscurity of many Caribbean islands and the ignorance of most Americans toward the colonial, economic, and social struggles of the indigenous people of these islands made these locations prime areas for travel destinations. For prospective American tourists, Caribbean music inspired specific geographical associations, free of the political baggage carried by West Indian inhabitants. As such, the music of calypso artists emerged as an American popular style that was appropriated for American consumption by major record labels, and artists, the US Navy Steel Band included, were poised to capitalize on the new sound and dominate the airwaves.

The American fascination with calypso was, in part, a cumulative process that began in earnest with the 1945 hit single Rum and Coca-Cola by the Andrews Sisters and was later built upon by Caribbean-themed Broadway musicals such as House of Flowers (1954), written by Truman Capote. Yet, the movement came into full swing in 1956 when Caribbean American singer Harry Belafonte’s Calypso album soared to the top of the Billboard charts. Practically overnight, the airwaves became saturated with the tuneful sounds of Mary Ann, Day-O, the Banana Boat Song, and many other calypso favorites. The Belafonte style of fun-in-the-sun musings, however, is a far cry from the social satire and harsh political protest that forms the chief subject matter of traditional Trinidadian calypsos, and the cultural disconnectedness led contemporary Caribbean and Trinidadian artists such as Geoffrey Holder to dismissively categorize the Belafonte style of calypso as Manhattan Calypsos.¹⁹

Prior to the wide-reaching success of Harry Belafonte’s calypso singing style in the 1950s, calypso music enjoyed a long history of regional popularity among Caribbean and Caribbean American audiences. The genre of calypso singing originated in Trinidad and Tobago during the latter part of the nineteenth century. Though the American calypso craze took hold in early 1956, the genesis of calypso music in the American recording industry began two decades prior, in approximately 1934, when the American Recording Corporation (soon to be renamed Decca) decided to enter the race records market and began importing steady streams of calypso singers from the Caribbean to record and produce records in New York. The experiment was a modest success within American markets, and Decca continued calypso recording projects through the end of the 1950s, often releasing the material on one of the company’s many subsidiary record labels.²⁰

In Trinidad and Tobago, however, these American-recorded calypso albums were wildly popular and Trinidad-born calypsonians such as Roaring Lion (Rafael de Leon) and Atilla the Hun (Raymond Quevedo) achieved great fame, some even earning something of a national hero status. Interestingly, unlike rock’n’roll and rhythm and blues, it was the edgy lyrics Trinidadian-style of calypso music, and not race, that failed to resonate with the mainstream American audiences initially. The genre’s catchy tunes and free-flowing musical style seemed ripe to appeal to American consumers; yet, one reason for the apparent disconnect was that lyrics and song meanings were often coded and colloquial. It was not until calypso had an image makeover that the disconnectedness between Trinidadian calypso lyrics and American audiences was overcome and the genre gained ground in the popular music markets of the United States.

Among the first American artists to shed the image, social commentary, and political baggage of Trinidadian calypso were the Andrews Sisters, who enjoyed a smash success with their calypso-flavored hit Rum and Coca-Cola in 1945. The song was first written and recorded by Trinidadian calypsonian Lord Invader (Rupert Grant) in 1942; however, the original version was unknown to American audiences and the exotic destination paired with the familiar sounds of the Andrews Sisters was an effective combination. The lyrics for the Andrews Sisters’ version of Rum and Coca-Cola are changed significantly from the original version; however, despite reading similarly to the lyrics of Lord Invader the strategic alterations change their meaning significantly.

Source: Andrews Sisters, Rum and Coca Cola, Decca Records, 18636A, 1945.

Despite the altered verses the chorus lyrics of Rum and Coca-Cola remain the same in both versions of the song leading the lyric phrase Both mother and daughter / Working for the Yankee dollar to take on an entirely different meaning.

As a result of the Andrews Sisters’ wholesome image and sanitized vocal delivery, gone too, are the secondary lyrical meanings commonly associated with Trinidad-style calypso songs. The greater American public was unaccustomed to the politics and culture of Trinidad and was oblivious to the colloquial language of Trinidad-style calypsos. Without the aid of a skilled calypsonion, such as Lord Invader, to emphasize key textural elements or pause on certain syllables, it appears as though the pointed lyrics dealing with prostitution had no deeper implications, understanding, or meaning to American audiences. Rum and Coca-Cola is a classic example of the forces behind the Manhattan Calypso genre and is a testament to the Trinidadian roots from which the genre sprang forth. The song spent ten weeks at the top of the Billboard Top 100 charts in 1945, and arrangements of the song were a repertoire staple for steelbands in Trinidad, the United States, and vacation resorts throughout the greater Caribbean for years and decades to come.

The success of Rum and Coca-Cola aside, by the early 1950s forays into large-scale distribution of black music was a profitable, but risky, endeavor for many major music labels in the United States. By 1955, these same labels were made increasingly uneasy by the volatility and controversial nature of black music’s emerging genres such as boogie woogie, jump blues, rhythm and blues, and early rock’n’roll. To compound the matter further, many small regional independent record labels or indies had once again risen into relevance following their collapse two decades prior during the Great Depression, and many of these indie labels—Chess and Sun, for example—were successful with up-and-coming black music artists the likes of Muddy Waters, Bo Diddley, and Chuck Berry. Conversely, white performers such as Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Bill Haley had at the same time recognized the potential and untapped markets to which black music could appeal and quickly capitalized on the opportunity.

The first white artist to capitalize on the crossover appeal of rock’n’roll was Bill Haley, who scored the first-ever number-one rock’n’roll hit on the Billboard and Cashbox charts with the song Rock around the Clock on July 9, 1955. Despite the importance of this moment in the larger trajectory of rock’n’roll history, Haley’s contemporary success was short lived and Rock around the Clock was deposed from the number-one position by the Mitch Miller Singers and their rendition of a nineteenth-century American parlor song The Yellow Rose of Texas some two months later. Mitch Miller is often tabbed the antirock crusader of the 1950s for famously denouncing rock’n’roll as geared toward eight to fourteen year-olds, to the pre-shaved crowd that make up twelve percent of the country’s population and zero percent of its buying power.²¹ Judging by the immediate success of Elvis and other rock’n’roll acts of the 1950s and, of course, the subsequent iconic lasting careers of said progenitors, Miller may have been patently off-base in his denouncement of the buying power of teenagers; yet, the popularity of Miller’s singing groups was undeniable and signals to a greater extent the complex forces at work within the music industry that were competing with rock’n’roll and other black music styles (calypso and steelband in particular) for a share of the American audience.

The fickle nature of the American public’s revolving taste for specific musical genres was only one element with which steelband had to contend; another issue was race. Rock’n’roll was a risky genre choice considering that racial tensions in the United States rose to a fever pitch with the impending desegregation of primary and secondary schools in the American South and the ubiquity of the racially motivated underhanded practices of radio censorship that ultimately led to the infamous payola scandal. The longevity of rock’n’roll was in question, and forward-looking record companies had to consider carefully the sustainability and risk of their investments. This led many executives for the major labels such as Capital and RCA to hesitantly resist the perilous siren call of rock’n’roll and instead focus their efforts on the proven sales of crooner Nat King Cole and others. Cole was part of small fraternity of black artists who stylistically reached beyond color boundaries of the American cultural mainstream and crossed over markets to attain significant commercial success. Building on the success of artists the likes of Cole, major recording labels simultaneously feared and salivated for the untapped consumers and market share represented by the potential audience of black music.

For RCA, the answer to this conundrum came from the young Caribbean American singer Harry Belafonte, who surprised record executives, and the nation, with his overnight hit album Calypso, released in 1956. The album was immediately popular and within a few short months Belafonte became a musical superstar. As a result of Belafonte’s success, the American calypso craze was launched in earnest and further exposure for the genre came from several calypso-themed Hollywood films such as Calypso Heat Wave (1957) and Bob Girl Goes Calypso (1957), which, similar to the musical House of Flowers before them, utilized loosely structured plots infused with calypso music, steelbands, and stereotypical island themes such as limbo parties and luaus.

Calypso was en vogue, and the entertainment industry scrambled to respond and capitalize on the deep pockets of American consumers’ penchant for escape. This moment also spawned the concept of the calypso club in the United States, which, according to calypso scholar Ray Funk, describes a fantastical place loosely based on stereotypical assumptions of the Caribbean, its culture, and its music.

Calypso clubs created an imaginary Caribbean atmosphere with fishnets, palm fronds and other trappings. Performers often wore straw hats and striped and floral outfits, unlike the dress suits worn by calypsonians in Trinidad. Particularly appealing for Americans were performance routines involving extemporaneous singing about audience members, risqué lyrics, limbo dancing and steelpans.²²

US Navy Steel Band Concert Poster (1958). Author’s Collection.

Fashionable indeed, the calypso club served the hip and elite of New York and other major American cities as an escape from the urban jungle without leaving the harbor. Calypso clubs often featured all-inclusive Caribbean Spectacular shows, complete with a cornucopia of Caribbean cultural capital that was exotically different from the typical day-to-day white suburban American experience.

For their part, the calypsonians, with pannists in tow, wooed patrons and played the role of entertainer much the same way their Trinidadian counterparts entertained the American troops in Trinidad during WWII.²³ By catering to American audiences new to calypso, the calypso club scene in America quickly associated the newly created calypso craze and steelpan sound with the entirety of Caribbean culture. From this moment in time onward, steelpan and the calypso music performed on the instrument were inextricably linked together in the hearts and ears of the American cultural mainstream.

The link between steelpan and calypso music largely drove the attitudes and perception of the instrument in the eyes of many key figures in American steelband history—chiefly among these was Admiral Gallery. Associating steelpan music with steelbands was, however, another story with tougher sledding and a slightly different trajectory. Connecting the music with its instrument was a process much less successful in America, and the development was mainly fostered by Hi-Fi audio enthusiasts and contemporary men’s magazines. Following the release of several steelband albums recorded in the Caribbean by Emory Cook in 1955 (Steel Band Clash—Cook: 01040 and Brute Force Steel Bands of Antigua—Cook: 01042) newspapers, men’s magazines, audio/Hi-Fi magazines, and other masculine and/or technology-focused periodicals began running stories on the unique sound of steelbands. The articles focused specifically on the people—as musicians, and not as cultural analysis per se—responsible for making this amazing music and made little to no mention of calypso. The New York Times kicked off the fray in September of 1955 in a new releases review by