50 years ago today: A Bahamian Icon in culture.Peanut the Wonder Boy Peanut The Wonder Boy Taylor The Bahamas has spawned and nurtured a wide range of drummers. Possibly the best known is Berkley Peanuts Taylor, whose name is synonymous with Bahamian music. His dynamic and hypnotic beat has been entertaining listeners in Nassau and around the world for more than six decades. The oft-repeated legend is that as a four-year-old he passed the over-the-hill nightclub of internationally acclaimed dancer Paul Meeres. I can sing and dance better than you, bragged the youngster. Youre nothing but a peanut, said Meeres and the little boy went into his act on the spot. Meeres hired him and he shared a stage with 300 pounds of joy, Princess Augusta Lewis. They were billed as Big Bina and Peanut the Wonder Boy. By age 18 he was touring Asia and Europe with a 25-member entourage. Taylor had a series of nightclubs over 30 years. He has performed around the world - including Havanas Tropicana in the buoyant 1950s - as a musical ambassador for The Bahamas. In 1993 his efforts earned him an MBE - membership in the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire. Taylor took a group of 22 musicians to Cuba in 2000 to demonstrate Bahamian Junkanoo music and culture. The next year he performed at Percussion 2001 in Cuba with musicians from Europe and Africa. He was the first non-Cuban to receive Cubas cultural medal of honour and was made a professor of percussion at Havanas Superior Institute of Art. Water taxi driver Basil Rolle, whose uncle, Ernest Stubbs, formed the original rake n scrape band, Lacido and the Boys, joined the group as a teenaged singer and drummer in 1980. We used to use the traditional goatskin drums, he says, but we use traps now because it often took half an hour to heat up the goatskins to get them tight enough to play. We used Sterno and sometimes had a little Sterno can built right into the drum. We used to burn our hands heating up the drums, and then my uncle brought new drums from Indiana.
Posted on: Sun, 04 Jan 2015 18:23:33 +0000
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