eville Marcano was born in Siparia, Trinidad in 1916. He became the national flyweight boxing champion at 13 years old in 1929. A few years later, Neville began a decades-long fight on the music scene as a calypso singer with the stage name, Growling Tiger.
Calypso, itself, was a form of resistance to the 1881 British ban on percussion instruments in the Caribbean colonies. Trinidadians responded with improvised steel drums made of everyday objects like frying pans and oil drums. Growling Tiger, Attila the Hun, King Radio, and others, paired those subversive sounds with liberationist lyrics that sometimes got them censored.
Growling Tiger is best known for “Money is King,” a critique of materialism, and “The Gold in Africa,” a protest of the Italian invasion of Ethiopia. Here are some samples of his biting sarcasm:
Fowl head, stale bread, fish tail and pone
But when a hungry man goes out to beg
They will set a bulldog behind his leg
Forty policeman may chuck him down too
You see where a dog is better than you.
—Money is King
Abyssinia appealed to the League for peace
Mussolini actions were like a beast
I don’t know why the man making so much strife
I now believe he want Haile Selassie wife
—The Gold in Africa
