Michel Martelly - Early Life

Early Life

Martelly was born in Port-au-Prince, the middle-class son of a Shell Oil executive. On his mother's side, his grandfather Auguste de Pradine had been a singer who wrote comic protest songs against the 1915-34 United States occupation of Haiti. After graduating from high school, Martelly enlisted in the Haitian Military Academy, but (according to Martelly) was expelled after impregnating the god-daughter of a general. In 1984 he moved to the United States, and worked in construction and briefly attended community college in Miami. In 1986, after one semester, he returned to Haiti just as Jean-Claude Duvalier, then president-for-life, was heading into exile. In 1987 Martelly returned to Miami with his then-girlfriend, Sophia, whom he later married in a small ceremony in Miami, Florida. They returned to Haiti in 1988.

Upon his return to Haiti, Martelly had his first breakthrough in the music industry when he began playing keyboard as a fill-in musician in local venues in Pétionville and Kenscoff, upscale suburbs of Port-au-Prince. Martelly "sang playful, romantic numbers over a slowed-down merengue beat called compas, the only music allowed under the Duvaliers." After the 1991 Haitian coup d'état saw the expulsion of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, "Martelly opened a Petionville club called the Garage, where he entertained many of the coup's main architects, including the much-feared chief of national police, Michel François, later convicted in absentia for massacring Aristide supporters. François liked Martelly's music so much that he allegedly lent the singer his own nickname: 'Sweet Micky.'"