guitarist), Earl “Bagga” Walker (prolific session bassist), and Tony King (original session percussionist). Though their literal words and images are absent, their presence can still be felt in this book.
Other important musicians I would have particularly liked to include, such as session drummer Lloyd “Tinleg” Adams, session bassist Brian Atkinson, and session guitarist Earl “Chinna” Smith, are not here because I ran out of time and resources before I could get to them; yet others, such as keyboardist Jackie Mittoo, saxophonists Roland Alphonso and Tommy McCook, and percussionist Denzil Laing, were no longer alive when I started the project. Among those I barely missed, hearing of their passing just as I was hot on their trail, were drummer Hugh Malcolm and guitarist Eric “Rickenbacker” Frater. I will always regret not having had the opportunity to sit down and talk with these notable innovators.
There are so many more elders of Jamaican popular music I would have liked to meet and interview, many of them still living. But Jamaica has produced an amazing amount of musical talent, and the number of “vintage” singers and musicians deserving of attention is much too large for any one investigator to hope to tackle. And so I must add my thanks as well to those researchers and writers—many of them music journalists—who have done interviewing of their own, including Heather Augustyn, Steve Barrow, Bruno Blum, Lloyd Bradley, Howard Campbell, Laurence Cane-Honeysett, Mel Cooke, Stephen Davis, Jim Dooley, Thibault Ehrengardt, Chuck Foster, Carl Gayle, Vivien Goldman, Bunny Goodison, Mark Gorney, Colby Graham, Randall Grass, Noel Hawks, Dave Hendley, Balford Henry, Ray Hitchins, Aad van der Hoek, Hank Holmes, Dennis Howard, Ray Hurford, Dermot Hussey, Clinton Hutton, Peter I, Tim Ianna, Brian Jahn, the late Tero Kaski, David Katz, Rob Kenner, Brian Keyo, Jérémie Kroubo Dagnini, Michael Kuelker, Chris Lane, Hélène Lee, Beth Lesser, Rich Lowe, John Masouri, Chris May, Daniel Neely, M. Peggy Quattro, Penny Reel, Amon Saba Saakana, the late Robert Schoenfeld, Mick Sleeper, Roger Steffens, Norman Stolzoff, Angus Taylor, Carter Van Pelt, Michael Veal, Pekka Vuorinen, Klive Walker, Tom Weber, Doug Wendt, the late Timothy White, Chris Wilson, and a handful of others. They have helped to preserve an important part of the history of Jamaican popular music, and I am grateful for the body of work they have published, which has provided me with a useful base for cross-checking and comparison.
Thanks are due as well to my editors at Wesleyan University Press, especially Parker Smathers and Elizabeth Forsaith, for their steadfast support and the improvements they brought to what you see in the following pages. I am grateful also to designer April Leidig for helping to make the book so pleasing to the eye.
Above all, I give thanks to the originators of Jamaican music who appear in this book. Their music has given me untold pleasure and inspiration over the years, and I continue to marvel at their accomplishments. Sitting down and sharing thoughts with them was a rare privilege, and even more rewarding than I imagined it would be.
Introduction
Let the words of our mouth,
And the meditation of our heart,
Be acceptable in thy sight,
O Far I
—Devotional lyric adapted by
Jamaican worshipers from Psalm 19
The half has never been told.” This oft-repeated phrase holds the key to a fundamental Jamaican truth, reminding each generation that no matter how much we think we know, there is always more—much more—to the story. Only with time, patience, and determination can what has long remained hidden be revealed. Nothing in Jamaica embodies this truth better than its music.
The voices and faces in this book speak to this truth from a special vantage point. Not only were these pioneers present when the earliest styles of Jamaican popular music were being born; more important, they themselves were some of the first players and shapers of these styles. Without their creative work, this music, as we know it, quite simply would not exist. Without their portion of the half that remains untold—their memories of the early days and the unique perspectives they can bring—there can be little hope of arriving at a balanced understanding of this music and how it came to be. Their truth is at the heart of this book.
Once scorned and neglected in both its homeland and the Euro-American Capitals of Culture, Jamaica’s popular music has gone on to capture the hearts and minds of people everywhere—and I do mean everywhere. While it is clear enough that this music (and here we must include the distinct genres of ska, rocksteady, and dancehall/ragga along with reggae) has risen to the status of a global art form over the last few decades, it is probably safe to say that no one knows just how vast its actual reach is today. It would take an army of researchers with unlimited time and resources to tally all the local permutations Jamaican music has left in its wake while penetrating virtually every corner of our planet. What we do know is that reggae, like its American cousin hip-hop, has crossed virtually every conceivable border and become one of the world’s most prominent sounds. How could one of the smallest and most economically challenged countries on earth produce a music of such astonishing boundary-breaching power? This in itself remains an enigma—a part, perhaps, of the “half that has never been told.”
Given its remarkable leap from obscurity and disdain to worldwide influence, it is hard to avoid the sense that there is something special and inexplicable about Jamaica’s popular music. What are the actual cultural wellsprings of this music, and who exactly are its creators? Despite the millions of words exchanged about the mysteries of Jamaican music since the global rise of reggae, the readily available answers, in my view, are far from satisfactory. This book is fueled partly by my frustration at this lack of adequate answers to basic questions.
THE NEW SOUNDS of ska, rocksteady, reggae, and dancehall—the distinctive genres of popular music that the world now identifies as Jamaican—came into being primarily in the recording studios of Kingston. On this point there seems to be general agreement. Although the dawn of Jamaica’s recording industry can actually be traced back to the early 1950s, when a handful of cottage enterprises emerged to produce records in the homegrown mento style for limited markets, it was not until the early 1960s that an explosion of recording activity began, unleashing an extraordinary new wave of musical creativity. The birth of Jamaica’s first urban popular music, ska, coincided precisely with the sudden appearance of full-fledged, modern recording facilities in the capital of the newly independent nation, and the major stylistic shifts that followed, from rocksteady through reggae and dub, grew directly out of Kingston’s rapidly evolving studio culture.
The existence of studios depended on certain things. A basic infrastructure was required, including a physical building, recording equipment, and musical instruments. Technicians were needed, including studio designers, recording engineers, and trained maintenance personnel. Some form of centralized economic management was indispensable, as were individual “producers” who possessed (or were able to scrape together) the financial means to initiate and enable recording sessions. None of this would have amounted to anything, however, without proficient musicians—individuals capable of making appealing musical sounds that could be captured on tape and then rendered into marketable products. In a very real sense, these musicians were the most important link in the chain, the foundation upon which everything else stood. They were the primary creators, the producers of first instance. Their livings depended on their ability to come up with novel sounds in the studio that people would want to listen to, dance to, and buy. Because of the demands placed on them, they were the primary architects of new and original musical styles.
This elementary point, you would think, should be self-evident. Yet it has gone largely unrecognized in the voluminous literature on Jamaican popular music. In fact, the fundamental contribution made by these studio musicians remains woefully underacknowledged. This omission can be attributed in part to certain peculiarities that became entrenched early on as the
