Music icon given
final serenade
PHILIPSBURG--Drummers and brass-players led the coffin of local music icon Hugo Nathaniel Davis ahead of about 200 mourners to his final resting place, where the body was greeted with the sounds of string-band music that had inspired his life and his legacy, on Friday.
Davis, better known as “Tanny,” founded the string music ensemble “Tanny and the Boys” more than six decades ago, entertaining the St. Maarten community with the melodious sounds of acoustic guitars, banjos and drums since the 1940s and setting the foundation for cultural cues on the island. He was sent off as he lived – in the presence of friends, neighbours and admirers, with music leading the way.
Hundreds attended Davis’ funeral service at the Philipsburg Methodist Church Friday, one week after the news of the 78-year-old’s sudden passing at his home in Fort Willem saddened the local community. His friends and former band-mates called him a good man who had done a great deal for culture and music on the local scene.
The local cultural scene remembers him as a trend-setter, carving a legacy of string music into the history of St. Maarten forever. Culture Commissioner Louie Laveist called him an icon with a discerning legend.
“Tanny” and his former band-mates Carlson Velasquez and “Culebra,” were knighted into houses of Royal Dutch honour, joining dozens of others to have received royal decorations from Her Majesty Queen Beatrix over the years.
A sombre procession of mourners marched down Front Street as the daylight of Friday dwindled into night. A group of five young girls spelled Davis’ nickname in decorated carvings they carried with them to the cemetery behind a banner with a caricature of Davis under the heading “SXM Musical Icon 1930-2008.”
Problems in getting the parade started threatened to mar the occasion, but mourners did not allow the late arrival of police and subsequent barring of Front Street to stop them from demonstrating en masse their appreciation for Tanny’s impact on their lives. Friends and family made up the numbers, with many wearing special T-shirts showing the same caricature with the words “We will always love you” inscribed below the image.
A curiously dry-eyed ceremony suddenly led to a downpour of tears as workmen laid bricks to seal Tanny’s coffin in a tomb at Mount Pleasant Methodist Cemetery. Mourners were almost inconsolable as the flower-lined tomb was sealed and Davis was laid to his rest.
However, a retro-string band complete with a banjo, two guitars and a washbasin guitar, which had taken the monotony out of the droning of hymns, livened up the final chords of the ceremony, playing one of Tanny’s favourites – a song that accompanies every performance of the St. Maarten dance “The Three-Step Polka.”
