Celebration of Women and the Steelpan Art Form
Steelpan Music Legends

Tribute To Women In Pan


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Winifred Atwell - Trinidad & Tobago

“... Atwell often returned to her native Trinidad, and on one occasion she bought a house in Saint Augustine, a home she adored and later renamed Winvilla and which was later turned into the Pan Pipers Music School by one of her students, Louise McIntosh. In 1968 she had recorded Ivory and Steel, an album of standards and classics, with the Pan Am Jet North Stars Steel Orchestra (director/arranger Anthony Williams), and supported musical scholarships in the West Indies...” 

She was the first black person to have a number-one hit in the UK Singles Chart and is still the only female instrumentalist to do so. She was first to open a black woman's hair salon.

She was an intellectual, a star, a child prodigy, a music Pioneer, multi-talented, thoughtful, forward-thinking and a steelpan musical collaborator  in an era when women were looked down upon for any association with pan.   When Steel Talks spotlights musician, performing artist, composer and world renown pianist extraordinaire and one of the biggest main stream artist in British history - the late Winifred Atwell, producer  of the most phenomenal steelpan music recordings ever - Ivory and Steel.”

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Born: February 27, 1914, Tunapuna, Trinidad and Tobago

Died: February 28, 1983, Sydney, Australia

Education: Royal Academy of Music

Albums: Ivory & Steel,  Her Other Piano, Queen of Honky Tonk, More

Record labels: Decca Records, RCA Records, Philips Records

Winifred Atwell was a Trinidadian pianist who enjoyed great popularity in Britain and Australia from the 1950s with a series of boogie-woogie and ragtime hits, selling over 20 million records. She was the first black person to have a number-one hit in the UK Singles Chart and is still the only female instrumentalist to do so.

Winifred Atwell was one of the stars of the early British charts when they were introduced for the first time in the 1950s, playing an upright piano in a boogie-woogie style of ragtime. She was born on February 27, 1914, in Tunapuna on the island of Trinidad. Her father owned a pharmacy, and although the young Winifred was trained in chemistry and was expected to join the family business, she was always more interested in performing for U.S. servicemen either at the air base or a local club, Piarco. Having trained from a very early age on the piano, she was proficient enough to satisfy the troops stationed in the Caribbean, when someone asked her to play in the popular style of boogie-woogie. When she returned to the club, she had written the song "Piarco Boogie," which was later to be retitled "Five Finger Boogie." Atwell moved to America in the early '40s to study the piano with Alexander Borovsky and later to London, where she studied at the Royal Academy of Music and became the first female pianist to be awarded the highest grade for musicianship. Supplementing her income while studying, she played ragtime at various London clubs and was spotted at the Casino Theatre by entrepreneur Bernard Delfont, who signed her to a recording contract with Decca Records.

Winifred Atwell and Puppy
Winifred Atwell

In 1946 Atwell met the comedian Lew Levisohn, who was to become her husband. Levinsohn suggested that an original sound and stage presentation might be achieved if Atwell first played a classical piece on a concert grand piano and then a ragtime on a battered upright, which they purchased in a junk shop for £2.50. This would become known as Atwell's "other piano," and would travel with her around the world, even to the Sydney Opera House. Both pianos would be very slightly detuned to give a faint off-key sound, and this originality was one of the stepping stones to her successful career. She also appeared cheerful with a dazzling smile and a warm personality, and in Britain during the late '40s, dominated by rationing after World War II, it was a welcome relief to be entertained by this very special lady. One of her recordings that became extremely popular in the early '50s was actually written in the 1920s by George Botsford and titled "Black and White Rag," which received an enormous amount of radio play and would later become famous as the signature tune for the BBC snooker series Pot Black.

When Britain introduced pop charts in November 1952, Atwell was one of the first black artists to hit the Top Ten and the first instrumentalist in the chart, with the song "Britannia Rag." The hits continued throughout the 1950s, including "Coronation Rag" in the summer of 1953 to celebrate Queen Elizabeth II's coronation, and at Christmas she recorded the first of her piano medleys of music hall songs under the title "Let's Have a Party," which included "If You Knew Susie," "The More We Are Together," "Knees Up Mother Brown," "Daisy Bell," "Boomps a Daisy," and "She Was One of the Early Birds." Setting a trend that would continue on all of her medleys, side one of the single was an uptempo rag while the B-side was a slightly slower medley. Reverting to her classical training, she hit the charts in 1954 with Rachmaninov's 18th Variation on a Theme by Paganini, and at Christmas she achieved her first number one hit with another medley, "Let's Have Another Party." The mid-'50s were a period of peak popularity for her in Britain, with Atwell playing at the Royal Variety Show and even at a private party for the Queen, where a personal encore of "Roll Out the Barrel" was requested.

Remembering Winifred Atwell

Her breakthrough performance in the U.S.A. was due to have been as a guest on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1956, but she was confronted with racist opposition to the idea of a black woman appearing as a guest, and the show was never even recorded. She encountered no such problems in Australia, where she visited in 1956 and became equally as popular. Back in Britain in that year she enjoyed her second number one single, a version of the French song "Poor People of Paris." After this hit, her massive popularity diminished with the two-pronged attack from the rise of rock & roll and a new young British pianist, Russ Conway, who began to have hit records with the same style of honky tonk/ragtime playing, and she found the Top Ten of the singles chart a difficult goal to reach, apart from her subsequent Christmas season medleys "Let's Have a Ding Dong," "Make It a Party," and "Piano Party." She was also exceedingly popular in Australia and was an outspoken critic of the plight of the Aborigines, and eventually she and her husband settled in Sydney. When Lew Levisohn died in 1977, she considered relocating back to Trinidad but remained in Australia. Tragedy struck in the early '80s when a fire destroyed her home in Narrabeen and she suffered a heart attack shortly afterwards. She died on February 28, 1983. ~ Sharon Mawer, Rovi.  From MTV Artist

Winifred Atwell
Winifred Atwell

From Wikipedia

When Atwell first came to Britain, she initially earned only a few pounds a week. By the mid-1950s, this had shot up to over $10,000. By 1952, her popularity had spread internationally. Her hands were insured with Lloyd's of London for a £40,000 (the policy stipulating that she was never to wash dishes). She signed a record contract with Decca, and her sales were soon 30,000 discs a week. She was by far the biggest selling pianist of her time. Her 1954 hit "Let's Have Another Party" was the first piano instrumental to reach number one in the UK Singles Chart. She is the only holder of two gold and two silver discs for piano music in Britain, and was the first black artist in the UK to sell a million records. Millions of copies of her sheet music were sold, and she went on to record her best-known hits, including "Let's Have a Party", "Flirtation Waltz", "Poor People of Paris" (which reached number one in the UK Singles Chart in 1956), "Britannia Rag" and "Jubilee Rag". Her signature "Black and White Rag" became famous again in the 1970s as the theme of the BBC snooker programme Pot Black, which also enjoyed great popularity in Australia when screened on the ABC network. It was during this period that she discovered Matt Monro and persuaded Decca to sign him.

Winifred Atwell spectacular

Winifred Atwell's peak was the second half of the 1950s, during which her concerts drew standing room only crowds in Europe and Australasia. She played three Royal Variety Performances, appeared in every capital city in Europe, and played for over twenty million people. At a private party for Queen Elizabeth II, she was called back for an encore by the monarch herself, who requested "Roll Out the Barrel". She became a firm television favourite. She had her own series in Britain. The first of these was Bernard Delfont Presents The Winifred Atwell Show. It ran for ten episodes on the new ITV network from 21 April to 23 June 1956, and the BBC picked up the series the following year. On a third triumphal tour of Australia, she recorded her own Australian television series, screened in 1960–1961. Her brilliant career earned her a fortune, and would have extended further to the US but for issues of race. Her breakthrough appearance was to have been on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1956, but on arrival in America she was confronted with problems of selling the show in the south with a British-sounding black woman. The appearance was never recorded.

Winifred Atwell's 'Ivory & Steel'

Atwell often returned to her native Trinidad, and on one occasion she bought a house in Saint Augustine, a home she adored and later renamed Winvilla and which was later turned into the Pan Pipers Music School by one of her students, Louise McIntosh. In 1968 she had recorded Ivory and Steel, an album of standards and classics, with the Pan Am Jet North Stars Steel Orchestra (director/arranger Anthony Williams), and supported musical scholarships in the West Indies. In the early 1980s, Atwell's sense of loss following her husband's death made her consider returning to Trinidad to live, but she found the weather too hot.

For the most part, based on data from MTV Artist

Read Special on Ivory and Steel Recordings by Dalton Narine




 

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