The Gleaner
This leads to the main reason many of us switched from calling the game ‘ping pong’ and used ‘table tennis’ instead. The fact is that we had another ‘ping pong’ that by the time I was born in 1945 was starting to develop into an art form that eventually took the world by storm and became Trinidad’s claim to global musical fame.
Ping pong was the name we initially gave to steelpan music and then to certain pans, notably the ‘tenor’. Angela Smith in her extremely well-researched Steel Drums and Steelbands: A History refers to a calypso, ‘The Beat Of The Steelband’ by Lord Kitchener in the ‘Bamboo to Steel’ section of the book, “Zigilee, Pops and Battersby/They coming with a semi-tone melody/When they start the contrary beat/They had people jumping wild in the street/ Port-of-Spain was catching a fire/ When the Steelband was crossing the Dry River/Zigilee leader of the ping-pong/ Had people jumping wild in the town.”...
...In my schooldays in Port-of-Spain around 1956 and later, with the Siparia Deltones steelband across the street from me, the ‘ping pong’, aka ‘steelband’, was part of my life. However, when I tried a ‘ping pong solo’, I was told by my friends in the band to stick to the soft drink ‘Solo’ and leave the ping pong alone.
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