Congratulation to Antigua Pan Patriarch, George "Nugget" Joseph; 100 'Pantastic' years old..

I would like to take this opportunity to wish George “Nugget” Joseph Happy belated birthday on his one hundred years birthday. Here is a little history.

During the latter part of the 1930s, the iron band men of Antigua heard about the steel drum that the pan men built in Trinidad and Tobago. The iron band was a group of men who got together spontaneously and made rhythm music with mostly iron and steel and anything metallic. After they heard about the new instrument that the Trinidadian developed, they set about to build their own. Soon after, an Antiguan man named Buster bought a pan from the Laventille area in Trinidad in 1938, and presented it to George nugget. In turn, Nugget sheared the information of the pan with two prominent iron band men, Seldan and Welly. In 1939, rapid development of the pan took place in the Point, Grays Farm and the Ovals area in Antigua.

“The steel band quickly spread throughout the Caribbean to the United States, to Venezuela, to Panama, and to other parts of the world. Antigua became a major center for steel-band activity. The American navy sported its own steel band, as did several American colleges. And the steel band became a fixture of the Trinidadian-style carnival in the remote Venezuelan mining town of El Callo, where West Indians had settled for a century.” (Hill, Donald 1993:208).

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Ronald Benjamin November 25, 2015 at 3:42am

I would like to take this opportunity to wish George “Nugget” Joseph Happy belated birthday on his one hundred years birthday. Here is a little history.

During the latter part of the 1930s, the iron band men of Antigua heard about the steel drum that the pan men built in Trinidad and Tobago. The iron band was a group of men who got together spontaneously and made rhythm music with mostly iron and steel and anything metallic. After they heard about the new instrument that the Trinidadian developed, they set about to build their own. Soon after, an Antiguan man named Buster bought a pan from the Laventille area in Trinidad in 1938, and presented it to George nugget. In turn, Nugget sheared the information of the pan with two prominent iron band men, Seldan and Welly. In 1939, rapid development of the pan took place in the Point, Grays Farm and the Ovals area in Antigua.

“The steel band quickly spread throughout the Caribbean to the United States, to Venezuela, to Panama, and to other parts of the world. Antigua became a major center for steel-band activity. The American navy sported its own steel band, as did several American colleges. And the steel band became a fixture of the Trinidadian-style carnival in the remote Venezuelan mining town of El Callo, where West Indians had settled for a century.” (Hill, Donald 1993:208).

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