Rose Hall Cultural Development Organization
Building sustainable community, spreading art, culture, and heritage.
A Story that Rose Hall Drummers have build up over years of experience!
In St Vincent and The Grenadines the Drum is a very unique instrument brought to svg by the runner away slaves of africa.Our music is a beautiful syntheses of African, European, Indian and indigenous influences, largely created by descendants of African slaves.
Most of our song are from calypso, punta, reggea, soca. Caribbean is also related to Central American and South American music.
In the colonial period, trade, slavery, migrations, and religion stimulated interaction among Caribbean Island, encouraging them to borrow musical resources from one another, they also integrated some French instruments( flûte, french drum)and techniques into their traditional music.
Our drums are made buy us, we offer to show and teach anyone who want to build his own drum. We call our Drum,The Tree trunk hand drum, it is very spirital and one of the first instrument. We believe that we mastered the Drum, it can heal the boby and mind so our music is very spiritral and inspirational for us.
ROSE HALL DRUMMERS' Story
tell by Selwyn Patterson
The drumming group started in 1998 after noticing that our culture was dying out.
When we decided to take it over because most of the members of the group that was before us have migrated to live overseas and with all different culture attempting to take hold on our youths, we decided to teach our youth about our culture and origin.
With Americanization and the impact of Western culture, traditional music and dance, although still practiced during events and professional performance, face serious threat of decline.
That's was the first reason for us to give special attention for our culture preservation.
So we started with seven members: Selwyn Patterson, Gilroy Williams, Lindon Richards, Wayne Alexander, Lloyd Patterson, Renrick Thomas and Brenton Alexander.
Our mission was to maintain our culture alive so for that we start many action et write projects.
Over the years we have thought a more than 35 children to play the drum correctly and also preform with them in various culture shows.
In order to keep our culture last for many generation , we started using Drums and dance like Maypole, Quadrille and part of doing that we also recorded our songs adapting our history and heritage to help our community to have respect of our culture.
To us, it means everything to use our passion as a bridge to our culture and help our community to develope life long skills in many fields like communication about our Heritage.
We need to make the best use of our heritage with respect and encourage love, joy, peace and harmony and hope for the future generation, because it will become our life style and our sustainable project to bring new job and facilities for youth.
The tree birthed the drum so that we and spirit could talk with common tongue
E. BONNIE DEVLIN, HUNTOGI DRUM MASTER
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We are recognized now as one of the best drumming and singing group here in SVG, because of our presence and energy we share with our audience all around SVG. We also represented Our Island overseas ( Venezuela, Canada, Denmark) and we are one of the best bridge between the communities and we can help to carry the name of our sponsor or the name of culture to many other region and peoples.
Our performance in The Venezuela was an eye opener for the band, we decided to live from our passion when we saw all the great things the culture can do in is own and foreign country. The people who saw for the first time our local music and dance , they were very impressed and admirative.
Rose Hall Drummers love their music, roots and heritage, so over the years we share our passion with all Vincentian and island around and now ,after many years of hard work and serial performance, they master their drums and wish to develop their music and share with many more people around the world.
