Sugar Belly (William Walker) was a Jamaican mento musician. He developed on… Read Full Bio ↴Sugar Belly (William Walker) was a Jamaican mento musician. He developed on his own the instrument he called the bamboo saxophone. At the height of his popularity in the late 1950s Sugar Belly was one of the important figures in the Jamaican music scene, turning his homemade saxophone into a natural vehicle for a distinctively Caribbean musical style. Sugar Belly was raised in Kingston. In music he was entirely self-taught. Just where he got the idea to create a bamboo saxophone is a bit of a mystery, since there is no traditional bamboo reed instrument in Jamaica, Sugar Belly's instrument seems to have been entirely his own in conception and design.

In the early days Sugar Belly played in talent exhibitions at Victoria Park in downtown Kingston, With increasing recognition he moved on to night clubs, such as the popular Glass Bucket located uptown at Halfway Tree. The leading popular music style in Jamaica at that time was mento. Sugar Belly's band originally used a typical mento instrumentation of banjo, guitar and shakers, with the big bass kalimba known in Jamaica as a rumba box providing the bottom. Later he incorporated electric guitar and bass. Through the 1960s mento gradually faded in popularity. Sugar Belly brought popular songs from a broader range of local and international styles into his repertoire; still, as time passed, he and his band were heard from less and less. He later moved to the parish of St. Anne on the island's north coast, and it was there that he died circa 1990 following a long illness.