Michel Martelly which had been abolished in the 1990s by Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Martelly was born in Port-au-Prince, the son of Gerard Martelly, a Shell Oil executive and Marie Madeleine De Martelly (1931-21 October 2016). On his mother's side, his grandfather Auguste de Pradines was a troubadour who wrote comic protest songs against the 1915-34 United States occupation of Haiti. After graduating from high school at the Institution Saint Louis de Gonzague, Martelly enlisted in the Haitian Military Academy, but (according to Martelly) was expelled after impregnating the daughter of a general. In 1984, he moved to the United States, and worked in
Michel Martelly 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 Pétion-Ville 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." Martelly has been heralded as a pioneer of a unique genre of compas, a style of Haitian dance music sung predominantly in the Haitian Creole language. Originally, compas, was the creation of Nemours Jean-Baptiste. Martelly, a keyboardist and the self-proclaimed "President of Compas," popularized a