Tobago's Our Boys celebrates 56th. anniversaryBy OPOKU WARE Thursday, April 1 2010
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Patrick Arnold, founding member of Our Boys....
OUR BOYS Steel Orchestra is the only steelband in the history of the pan movement to make it on the prestigious American Billboard music charts. The Tobago based steelband, which is based at Fort Street in Scarborough, achieved its Billboard ranking in 1989 with a Len “Boogsie” Sharpe arrangement of “Pan Night and Day”.
The band, whose most prominent member is former Pan Trinbago President Patrick Arnold, is currently celebrating its 56th anniversary. Arnold recently gave an account of how the steelband came into being.
“During the early 1950s, the only steelband in Scarborough was Rhythm Tigers from Wilson Road led by one Mr Harewood. One Carnival day the powerfully built Cecil Armstrong insisted that the band members keep on playing when they wanted to take a rest. When the pannists decided to rest, Armstrong got angry and mashed up their pans and threw the instruments into the sea.”
According to Arnold, the members of the Rhythm Tigers band who were from the Fort George area went back to their community and formed the Elite steelband.
Arnold recalled that along with Elite, another steelband known as Fantasia, comprising mostly Bishops High School students formed at the Young Street. Fantasia gave way to the Main Street- based Symphony Stars led by Hilton Nancis.
It was at Symphony Stars that Arnold’s long and distinguished steelband career began. This is how he remembers those early days in the steelband: “I was a young boy and I used to go to the pan tent and hold the flambeau for the men to see the notes on the pan when they were practising and I took good notice of how they were playing.”
Arnold said he took the opportunity to try his hands on the pans before the pan men came to practise and one day the captain heard him playing and asked him to join the band.
“As a 12-year-old, I was playing at hotels and other venues in Tobago,” he added.
As Arnold explained, a dispute between the symphony captain and Lennard Nelson over a tenor pan caused the split in Symphony. He, along with Lennard, Neville ‘Boy Blue’’ Defraitas, Ronald Campbell, Cecil Louis, Earnest ‘Beng Lyons were thrown out of the band.
“When we were thrown out of Symphony, Cecil Louis was paid $8, Defraitas got $12 and I received $6. We put our money together and bought three steel pans and that was the birth of Our Boys.”
The band functioned under a mango tree but situations developed which forced them to move to different locations on the Hill. However, Our Boys eventually returned to settle under the mango tree where we first started.
By this time Arnold had won a scholarship to study at St Mary’s College in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad. While at the college he came across the name “Our Boys” in a magazine and gave the band that name.
“Although I was the youngest member of the band, I was made the captain, while Neville ‘Boy Blue’ Defraitas was made the vice captain. While I was at St Mary’s, he took charge of the band.”
Arnold’s time as a student was to prove valuable for Our Boys because it gave him the opportunity to interact with the Trinidad steelband fraternity and begin his development as a pan tuner. He said: “I got the experience to play with the legendary Casablanca steelband from East Port-of-Spain. While there, I had a close-up view of pan pioneers such as Oscar Pyle, Patsy Haynes and the “mean men” of the band such as Barong and One Man.
“It was a great experience for me, I remember in 1957, I was practising with the band for Carnival and I got a message from Tobago that Our Boys was bringing out a mas band called Zapata. Two days before carnival I took the boat and left for Tobago to join my band. I returned late for school on Ash Wednesday and explained to the priest in charge of the college why I was late he just could not believe that someone would leave Trinidad to go to Tobago for Carnival.”
Arnold the student continued to check the ever evolving Trinidad steelband movement.
“While at St Mary’s anytime the college gave us time off to go to the Queen’s Park Oval to watch cricket, I used the time to go the pan yard of Invaders which was near to the Queen’s Park Oval.”
It was at Invaders Pan Yard that Arnold’s pan tuning skills began to develop.
“There were other steelbands near to the Oval such as Katzenjammers and I frequented all of them, but it was at Invaders Pan Yard where I witnessed the pan tuning skills of the great Ellie Manette and Emmanuel “Cobeaux Jack” Riley. I learned from watching these men at work,” he said.
Arnold described Jack as one of the finest tenor pan players he has ever known.
Our Boys under the leadership of Patrick Arnold began to make a name for themselves. The band was well booked on the then thriving Tobago hotel circuit and at other events on the island. At the same time, Arnold’s reputation as a “crack shot” tenor pan player began to grow.
In 1962, Our Boys was selected among the six finalists for the National Music Festival Final in Trinidad, while Arnold was one of the Pan Soloist finalists. “We were competing against such bands as Pan-Am North Stars, Silver Stars, Metronones and a South band, but when we got to the venue, the steelbands had called a strike to protest against certain conditions. In fact, Pan-Am North Stars were already on their way out of the venue when the then Prime Minister Eric Williams intervened to save the night.”
Our Boys also made the festival finals in 1963, while Arnold was a Pan Solo finalist on three occasions.
During the 1960s Arnold was one of those seeking to fulfil his academic dreams, so he went to the United States.
“My intention was to get into Howard University but when I went there I realised that I did not have the finances to go through university and my mother was not in a position to help me, so I returned home,” he revealed..
However, Arnold had a burning desire to pursue his academics, so he returned to the United States in 1965. In his absence, Bertille St Clair, who would later become the well-known football coach, was left in charge of Our Boys. St Clair kept the band as a tightly knit unit while Arnold was away.
In New York he recalled “I enrolled in Manhattan College and I met Clifford Alexis who introduced me to BWIA Sunjets steelband. They had no pan tuner, so I took on that responsibility. I sent a message to Bertille to send up my tenor pan and my involvement in pan in North America was well on the road.
“I met with Andy Narrel and he got me involved in pan tuning with Ellie Manette. I taught African American kids the art of pan playing, as a means to take them off the streets and that was very successful.”
Arnold later moved to Canada where he enrolled at the University of Toronto.
“There was a steelband there called Steltones which had a number of Tobagonians, such as Earl Wong, Ken Thomas, Ken Jones and Larry Sardinah. This was the only steelband in Toronto so we got a lot of jobs. In order to help the steelband do its work, I sent for Neville ‘Basa’ Muraldo a competent pan player and pan tuner from Tobago.”
Arnold used his North American connections to put Our Boys on the international stage and the band made trips to San Francisco, Washington and throughout, the United States university circuit in the US. The band also toured Nigeria in Africa, and Guam in the Pacific, South East Asia and they performed at the Grape and Wine Festival in Canada. The Tobago steelband also played for the South African freedom fighter Nelson Mandela and on a show featuring Calypso King of the World Sparrow, Baron and other top artistes.
Our Boys produced music albums in 1986 (Pan Night and Day) and 1989 (Pan Progress), which were released on the Mango Record Label. Pan Night and Day went on to make it on the Billboard ranking, the only steelband in history to achieve this distinction.
At present, Arnold and the members of Our Boys are fighting against great odds to improve the structure of their pan theatre at Fort Street. However, under the leadership of the evergreen Arnold and the musical directorship of Roger Sardinah, Our Boys seems destined for further pan glory.
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