Ray Holman and the Changing Role of the Steelband, 1957-72

Abstract

Ray Holman and the Changing Role of the Steelband, 1957-72 Shannon Dudley (bio) In 1957 at the age of thirteen, Ray Holman joined the Invaders steelband which practiced within hearing distance of his house (though figuratively "on the other side of the tracks") in Woodbrook, a western neighborhood of Port of Spain, Trinidad. In 1962 having become one of the Invaders' most respected players, Holman left to arrange for Starlift, another Woodbrook band, and many younger members of Invaders went with him. The move to Starlift coincided with Trinidad's independence from England and, more importantly for Holman's musical career, the beginning of the Panorama steelband competition. Between 1963 and 1973, while working during the day as a Spanish teacher at Fatima College, he established himself as one of the premier steelband arrangers in Trinidad, winning Panorama with Starlift in 1969 and 1971, and helped define a whole new approach to steelband music. In 1972 Starlift abandoned the convention of arranging popular calypsos for Panorama and instead played Holman's original composition, or "own tune" in the competition. This was a momentous event in the history of Panorama, leading to the end of Holman's association with Starlift and the beginning of new possibilities for the steelband.1 This period of Ray Holman's personal history coincided with pivotal changes in the music of steelbands and their role in Trinidadian culture. The dates in the title of this article mark Holman's start with the Invaders steelband, and his maverick decision fifteen years later to write his own composition for the Panorama competition. The same dates frame a period during which Trinidad gained political independence, and the Panorama stage became the premier performance venue for steelbands, leading to changes in repertoire and style as well as steelband organization and economics. The parallel between these developments and Holman's career is not drawn to suggest that Holman was primarily responsible for the [End Page 183] course of events. Indeed there were many other influential musicians during this time, and the art form was affected by powerful forces of history, politics, and ideology that could not be attributed to a single person. However, the most active period of Holman's career coincided with certain dramatic changes in the broader steelband movement. I will describe these changes in relation to three overlapping periods: (1) transformation of the steelband's social status in the 1940s and 1950s, of which Holman's entrance into the art form is emblematic; (2) diversity of steelband repertoire and venue in the 1950s and 1960s, the formative period in Holman's own musical development; and (3) opportunities and constraints in the post-independence Panorama competition. Ray Holman's musical decisions responded to these circumstances and also helped to shape them. My decision to describe a period of steelband history through the prism of an individual musician's experiences responds to a concern that Trinidadians often express for documenting their artists' achievements. Trinidadian journalist and steelband historian Kim Johnson, for example, advocates more documentation of the histories and experiences of particular steelbands and musicians, and expresses dismay that steelbands, unlike Trinidadian calypso or masquerade, "fell to the social scientists by default, as if beating pan was some quaint folk practice, an aspect of ethnicity or national identity or pluralism—anything but a serious, modern art form" (1996, 4). To be fair to social scientists, Johnson's concern parallels social science scholarship that looks at the way individual actions are not only conditioned by larger cultural forces, but may also change or constitute those forces (Ortner 1984). Nonetheless, it would also be fair to say that ethnomusicologists have tended to weight their presentations of musical histories toward the social context in which musicians operate. Kay Shelemay suggests that ethnomusicologists have been reluctant to focus on the "great masters" of the musical cultures they study, "in part because of our residual mistrust of the individual focus of historical musicology" (1987, 489). While there are good reasons to be skeptical of such an approach, Johnson's remarks remind us that it can be equally misleading, and antithetical to the views that many people have of their own musical histories, to emphasize...

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