History

                                                Picture of Biscuit (crackers) Drum

The biscuit tin replaced the bass for rhythm to avoid further injury. When it was discovered that the bamboo instruments were also used in the inter-district fights that had replaced the old tribal friendly rivalries organized between the plantations, the police banned the instrument

Earlypan convex shape

Tony Williams, Inventor of the spider web concept ( He is on the right).

                                                         Picture of Bamboo

To accompany celebrations after the banning of their drums, the Africans turned to bamboo cut to different lengths and then beat on the ground to form bands called tamboo bamboo, from tambour", French for drum. The tamboo bass often caused injury to the foot when it pounded the ground as well as damage to the road surface.

The early pioneers of the pan, were viewed as good for nothing vagabonds to be treated with scorn.  They were looked down upon as  the outcast of society. Laventille had become a settlement of people without land, without work, and deprived of natural access to the full richness of cultural resources. At the time of greatest pressure, the steel pan was invented and quickly became a vehicle of social identification, with John John &

Laventille  being its birthplace, the cradle of the most momentous musical occurrence in 20th Century musical history.

Oral accounts from surviving steel band pioneers and enthusiasts, together with the little that has been written, suggest that the invention and early development of the steel pan was not the outcome of a stroke of genius of a single individual, but the product of socially outcast communities groping for self-expression. Many people contributed to the development of the steel pan