When Ellie Mannette told people he could make a 55-gallon (208-litre) barrel sing like a cello, they laughed.

It was the early 1940s, and Mannette could hear what no one else could. He could see what he could not yet make.

The sound in his head became his muse, and his desire to make music became more than a passion and stronger than love.

"I was born to do this," says Mannette, a pioneer in the evolution of the steel drum. He is a musician once scorned by his countrymen in Trinidad but now revered for helping to make the island's indigenous instrument a national treasure.

"I don't know what drove me on," he says. "The more people tried to ridicule me, the more determined I got. I said, 'I'll show you.'"

At 70, Mannette is credited with developing seven of the "voices" - or instruments - in a 10-piece steel drum band. He is among only about a dozen drum artisans in the United States.

Mannette runs the University Tuning Project at West Virginia University, where his students help elevate "the pan" from its humble beginnings to what they believe is its rightful place among the world's musical instruments.

He is the typical professor, a man of average height and build, with curly graying hair, a neatly trimmed moustache, and well-pressed shirt and slacks. The skin around his eyes crinkles when he grins, which is often, but his face gives little hint of his age. "I don't worry about anything," Mannette says. "I don't drink. I don't smoke."

His work helps, too. Mannette spends his days teaching new generations to build the instrument that has been his life's work.

He is many things: artist, teacher, lecturer, and performer. He is a man whose feelings run deep, his eyes filling with tears as he talks of an estranged wife who died when he was still young. And he is a man who holds a grudge, his voice growing louder as he talks about the bitterness he still feels toward Trinidad.

Mannette left his birthplace in 1967 after enduring homelessness, harassment and humiliation. He has made peace with his 107-year-old father who once threw him out of the house, but he no longer considers the Caribbean island his home.

"The entire nation treated me badly while I was developing this instrument. They tried to stop it and destroy it," he says.

As teenagers, Mannette and his friends formed a band, tapping out tunes on biscuit tins and garbage can lids. Other island youth had discovered years before that indentations on convex metal surfaces could produce different sounds. Soon, aspiring musicians developed fierce rivalries.

After performing in Port-of-Spain, Mannette was attacked with a machete by a member of a rival band. He got away with a superficial wound on his right hand. Another time, someone tried to stab him in the back.

"It was like an order to get Ellie Mannette," he says.

After a few years, Mannette had earned some recognition for his early work on the steel drum. When he was in his early 20s, the island's British government offered him a scholarship at a school in England. He rejected the offer.

"I wanted to develop the pan. I told myself, 'If I take the scholarship, I will forget everything I see in my mind. I will lose all interest.'"

The decision cost him his family, his home, his respect.

Mannette's parents were poor, and his father, a carpenter, was furious that a young man with nothing would throw away the chance at a free education.

"I was looked at as being a vagabond, lacking ambition," Mannette says.

Ejected from the family home, Mannette slept where he could and stole food to survive. His father's disdain spread, and the entire community began to reject him as shiftless. If Mannette worked on his drums in an alley, the police would roust him for making too much noise.

No one would give Mannette an empty barrel to work with, so he would sneak onto Shell Oil Company's property at night, climbing fences and outrunning dogs to make off with the 55-gallon (208-litre) drums he then stashed in mangroves and savannas.

He would sit among the snakes and insects in the heat of the day, tiling away with a hammer to create the sounds in his head.

"I could see it in my mind but no one could believe me because I couldn't produce it," he says. "I had an idea of what it should be like and sound like, but I couldn't show it."

Year after year, he worked. The drums began to take shape.

Mannette married twice while in Trinidad, but both unions fell victim to his love for the pans. His in-laws were critical of his seeming lack of ambition, and both wives sided with their parents when a choice had to be made.

By 1967, he'd had enough. Mannette left Trinidad to work full time for Grace Line, a New York shipping and cruise company. The job led to work in the public school system.

While working with a youth programme in Flushing, New York, Mannette was asked to play his drums at Queens College. The appearance was the birth of a lecture and workshop career, first in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, and finally at West Virginia University.

Mannette believes the steel drum eventually will win the respect it deserves and end up a vital part of orchestras.

(AP)