Elton John congratulates Trinidad and Tobago for Winifred Atwell’s Queen’s Hall honour

Five-time Grammy Award-winning singer, songwriter and pianist Elton John has congratulated TT for renaming Queen’s Hall Auditorium to honour a Trini-born pianist whom he credits as his first idol.

In a video message played at the renaming ceremony on September 23, John said: “Winifred Atwell…gave me the momentum to become who I am. Congratulations to the Republic of TT on renaming the Queen’s Hall Auditorium to the Winifred Atwell Auditorium. Well deserved and thank you so much.”

John said his family bought a lot of Atwell’s albums when he was a little boy learning to play the piano.

“The turning point for me with Winifred Atwell was seeing her on television. Seeing how beautiful she was, her smile, the way she played the piano.

“She could do classical things, she could do great boogie-woogie stuff…I was entranced by her. She fascinated me and I fell in love with her. I fell in love with her kindness. She had an aura of kindness and talent and her smile- I copied that smile.”

“I idolised her. She was literally my first idol as a piano player and it’s never left me really. She’s always in my heart.”

John has never been one to hide the instrumental (no pun intended) role Atwell had on him and his regard for her. It was even included in his 2019 autobiography, Me.

In it, he described her as: “a big, immensely jolly Trinidadian lady who performed onstage with two pianos.”

“I loved her sense of glee, the slightly camp way she would announce, ‘And now, I’m going to my other piano’; the way she would lean back and look at the audience with a huge grin on her face while she was playing, like she was having the best time in the world,” he said.

In his video message, John added he was able to meet her at an airport after he had made it big in show biz.

“She came over to me and we both gave each other the biggest hug and she bought me a Koala bear which I thought was so sweet. So I did meet my idol.”

The name change was approved by the government on August 22. Atwell was born in 1915 and raised in Tunapuna. She moved to New York after World War II and then to England in 1946. She was highly popular in Britain and Australia from the 1950s with a series of boogie-woogie and ragtime hits, selling over 20 million records.

She was the first black artist to have a number-one hit in the UK Singles Chart and as of 2023, was the only female instrumentalist to do so. In 1969, she was awarded the Hummingbird Gold medal for her contribution to world music.

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