Miriam Bassett-Tucker was one of the island’s best-known calypso dancers in the 1950s. Today, few of the younger generation know her name.

Atlantic Publishing House is looking to change that. She’s one of several performers to be honoured at Café Lido tomorrow for their contributions to the arts.

Mrs Bassett-Tucker tells us more ...

How does it feel to be honoured?

I feel great. It’s been a long time coming. I’ve been performing on the island since 1948.

How did you get started?

I was brought up in a musically inclined family. My godfather had a band and he would play music and I’d be on my feet dancing while he played. My love for it just grew from there.

My whole family was interested in music. When Gregory Gordon opened up his school we all went there. He started off teaching us ballet and a little bit of this and that, but I took to calypso and started that when I was 13 or 14.

We danced at different venues in those days and then came right back home. We didn’t perform in any of the clubs. It was fun, a lot of fun.

When did you get your big break?

A couple of entertainers and myself would go out to Elbow Beach, where one of us would do a little dance routine, sing or play the drums. My cousin and I, we started off doing the calypso dancing and after that another lady brought the limbo back to Bermuda and we joined in with that.

We did calypso, jazz and limbo in our group. Later on down the road my husband, Eugene Tucker, joined us and we became the Calypso Trio.

What was it like performing in those days?

It was nice; people loved us. We entertained in all the hotels, even though black people weren’t allowed to go to the hotels at that time. We danced almost every night for the tourists.

We worked at the Kindley Field Base and that’s where we got involved with Olive Trott [an events promoter who started the North Shore Majorettes]. We enjoyed it because we loved to dance and it was fun for us. We didn’t mind it at all.

We later got invited to the Apollo Theatre in Harlem, New York. When we came back after that trip we went back into the hotels here and then we started dancing at the Clayhouse Inn and Rosebank Theatre.

• King Trott, Ranham Burch, David Burch, John Burch, Stan Seymour, Eddie Ming, Jimmy O’Connor, Keith Caisey, Sandy Butterfield, Rudolph Benjamin, Mildred Iris, June Caisey, Stan Gilbert and Charles “Jiggs” Douglas will also be honoured tomorrow from 2pm until 4pm