About Me
Drupatee Ramgoonai, a young woman from the village of Penal in the deep south of Trinidad. Drupatee emerged onto the Indian Soca scene in 1987 with the release of the single "Pepper Pepper," a song in which she describes the hardship of being an East Indian housewife. In the song, she sings, almost in a comical manner of how she plans to seek revenge on her husband, whose lack of interest in their marriage drives her insane. Her solution is simply to put pepper in his food, and to hear him say, "Pepper, I want Panni (water) to cool meh, Pepper I want plenty Panni." While "Pepper Pepper" went on to become a hit on the Soca charts Drupatee pressed on with her music releasing another album a year later. In the summer of 1988, she lept onto the charts once again with a new song entitled "Mr. Bissessar." The song described her admiration of a certain Trinidadian Tassa player by the name of Bissessar. The world would later come to know this song, as Roll Up De Tassa. By mid July 1988, just 2 weeks after its release, "Mr. Bissessar" had hit #1 in every country in the English speaking Caribbean, from Antigua to Guyana. A few weeks later, this was repeated on the Soca charts in the United States, Canada, and England. Drupatee had made history as not only the first East Indian woman, but the first East Indian to successfully cross over onto the Soca charts and to have a #1 hit. If Sundar Popo was the King of Indo-Caribbean music, then Drupatee was its Queen. The success of "Mr. Bissessar" would push East Indian music once again into the spot light and paved the way for many future Indo-Caribbean artists such as Rikki Jai and Chris Garcia. "Mr. Bissessar" would go on to become one of the most successful Soca songs of the 1980â€,,s, and it became the best selling Indian Soca song of all time. In fact, it remained at #1 until almost the end of the decade when it was finally knocked out by Crazy's Indian Soca hit, "Nani Wine," which incidentally was inspired by the story of "Mr. Bissessar
