Born Neville Marcano in 1915 in Siparia, Trinidad, West Indies, the future performer died on 13 May 1993. During his teenage years he pursued boxing under the ring name Siparia Tiger and captured Trinidad’s flyweight title in 1929. Four years later he began singing calypsos to earn a living. Adopting the stage name Growling Tiger, he quickly triumphed in competitions thanks to sharply worded, socially pointed songs. Though the youngest member of the 1930s generation of calypsonians, he drew on the genre’s African, French and Spanish lineage while also absorbing the smooth delivery of contemporary pop vocalists such as Bing Crosby and Maurice Chevalier. Over the course of his career he cut forty-six titles for Decca’s calypso series and partnered on duets with Atilla The Hun and King Radio. His appeal remained strong through the 1940s and 1950s, yet by the early 1960s his career had declined, partly because of the emergence of younger, modern-styled artists including the Mighty Sparrow and Lord Kitchener, and partly because a 1959 Carnival number that questioned the private conduct of Trinidad’s president provoked a sustained campaign of harassment. In 1962 Lomax captured the only field recordings made of any calypsonian during his Caribbean research trip that year; issued as Neville Marcano - The Growling Tiger Of Calypso, they preserve extended narrative verses accompanied by string-band forces of violin, flute, guitar and percussion. Tiger still performed sporadically, supplied material to other singers and issued collections of his lyrics. At the 1966 Newport Folk Festival he taped additional selections with Lomax, two of which appear on the same album. There he also encountered and formed a friendship with Puerto Rican cuatro player Yomo Toro. In 1979 Toro directed the Trans-Caribbean All-Star Orchestra for Tiger’s Knockdown Calypso sessions, which enlisted Cuban-scene notables trumpeter Alfredo ‘Chocolate’ Armenteros and bassist Bobby Rodriguez together with Trinidadian musicians. The resulting album stands among the rare modern-studio documents of an earlier calypso master. Growling Tiger succumbed to a lengthy illness in 1993.
