assembled musicians for sessions and paid for studio time. Session musicians most often were hired on an ad hoc basis, being paid per song or individual recording. Their creative labor was treated as a kind of piecework, the end product of which belonged solely to those who had paid for it. Not only did producers own and control the resulting master tapes, which they were free to convert into marketable commodities as they wished, but they often felt that they owned the music itself in perpetuity. Some even went so far as to claim authorship (or coauthorship), crediting themselves on record labels as composers, and in some cases copyrighting or publishing songs in their own names.
There were, in fact, many more pieces to this puzzle, and students of Jamaican music will be teasing out the complex factors involved in the growth of this somewhat chaotic local music industry for years to come. On the creative side of things, one can single out certain prominent contributors who played an important role alongside the instrumentalists who provided the musical bedrock. These include singers, songwriters, arrangers, and audio engineers. But as more information comes to light about the recording process during the critical formative years, it becomes increasingly apparent that a large majority of the creative work, especially during this early period, fell on the shoulders of the session musicians who ultimately were responsible for inventing the musical frameworks (and with the advent of multitrack recording, the backing tracks and fundamental “riddims”) upon which hit records (and later, dub versions and deejay tracks) were constructed. More often than not, singers arrived in the studio with little more than a sketch of a song, consisting of partial lyrics and a tentative melody devoid of a harmonic progression or arrangement. The musicians routinely supplied the critical missing elements (including the song’s rhythmic structure) on the spot, through a collaborative process of experimentation and playing-in-the-moment—what might be thought of as a kind of spontaneous composition. These session musicians, in effect, actually doubled as co-composers and arrangers.
Seldom did the producer in charge of a session contribute specific musical suggestions to this fast-moving creative process (although there were exceptions). Indeed, producers were often not even present at the actual sessions. For this reason, Jamaica’s foundational session musicians often point out the need to qualify the term “producer.” It would be more accurate, they say, to characterize most of those who bore this title as “executive producers,” meaning simply the parties who financed the production. According to these musicians, those who typically styled themselves “producers” in Jamaica (with rare exceptions, such as the legendary Lee “Scratch” Perry) were producers only in this financial sense and had very little to do with the actual creation of the music they ended up controlling. Creatively speaking, these musicians insist, they themselves were most often their own producers (although they sometimes also credit audio engineers for innovative contributions, which could feed back into the ways session musicians thought about and played their music).
The peculiar way in which the local recording industry was structured led to a perverse outcome. As markets for Jamaican music expanded over time and the economic potential of the music, including older recordings, increased exponentially, the actual creators of the music watched while the “producers”—those who held the master recordings (and sometimes the legal rights)—received most or all of the resulting windfall. Studio musicians were not alone in being deprived of what they saw as their just deserts. Singers (who often were also songwriters) shared this embittering experience, for most of their recordings had been made before the notion of copyright had gained any real traction in Jamaica. As they became aware that recordings featuring their voices (and sometimes songs they had written) were now being sold around the world for profits they would never see, they found that they had little or no legal recourse, since they lacked proper documentation of the circumstances of composition or recording. But the session musicians—the instrumentalists on whose talents the entire enterprise rested—suffered the added indignity of receiving virtually no credit for their efforts. While some singers at least achieved a measure of fame and were able to translate this into new opportunities for live performance and touring abroad, most of the foundational musicians, as times changed and new musical trends took over, were forgotten and languished in obscurity.
Adding insult to injury, many of the first generation of “producers” themselves went on to gain a certain celebrity, eclipsing the musicians who had worked for them. Confronted with a growing variety of Jamaican releases that typically featured prominent “production” credits but little or no information on instrumentalists, fans began to identify particular sonic qualities and stylistic traits with specific studios and producers rather than the revolving “stables” of musicians on whom they depended. “Producers” became as “legendary” for what was thought of as “their” music as for the romanticized stories told about their exploits in Jamaica’s “cutthroat” music business. To a large extent, scholars, music journalists, and other writers have followed suit, treating well-known producers, most of whom were essentially small businessmen looking to turn a quick profit, as if they deserve primary credit for the creative output of the musicians they employed on a temporary basis. Strange as it might seem, the names (or nicknames) of these nonmusician entrepreneurs (for example, Clement “Sir Coxsone” Dodd, Arthur “Duke” Reid, Harry Johnson [“Harry J”], Bunny “Striker” Lee, Vincent “Randy” Chin, Joel Gibson [“Joe Gibbs”], Lloyd “Matador” Daley, Sonia Pottinger, Lawrence Lindo [“Jack Ruby”], Joseph [“Jo Jo”] Hookim, Alvin “G.G.” Ranglin, and Leslie Kong, among others) are today much more likely to be recognized by aficionados of reggae than those of the founding musicians who actually created and performed the sounds that mean so much to so many around the world.
If one chooses to focus on the founding musicians themselves, rather than their employers, the implications are far-reaching. Consider the backgrounds of these foundational players. Although formally trained and highly experienced professional musicians always have played an important role in Jamaican studios—and during the transition from American-style rhythm and blues to ska they were particularly prominent—sessions were, from the beginning, open to anyone who could bring interesting musical ideas and could play with the right “feel.” Over time, as migration from rural areas increased, more and more people from Kingston’s expanding periphery, many of them recently arrived from country parts, turned to the rapidly growing music industry as a means of subsistence. Although few in Jamaica could afford a formal education in music, life across the island was full of music of a noncommoditized kind—music that formed part of the fabric of daily life—and some of those who had participated in such “traditional” musical settings in the countryside or on the urban fringe might well think of themselves as bearers of “natural” musical gifts. As it turned out, more than a few such individuals were able to work up the courage to try their hands in the studios, and before long they were to become a critical part of the mix that produced Jamaica’s distinctive popular sound.
Whether urban or rural, trained or untrained, session musicians are key to the understanding of how this popular music evolved. As a vernacular tradition, a genuine “people’s music,” reggae (in its broadest sense) has always been viewed by the society from which it sprang as an expression of something greater than individual creativity (although individual artistry is certainly appreciated in Jamaica). Like all popular musics, its success, artistic as well as commercial, depended on broad appeal. As the business of Jamaican popular music grew, the participants in the best position to coax forth new sounds that would appeal to the broadest possible cross-section of the population were not those who happened to be skilled in the arts of promotion and marketing, but rather those who, at a profound level, shared a preexisting musical language with the majority of their countrymen and were capable, in the contrived setting of the studio, of translating this effectively into fresh and original, yet locally rooted, syntheses. Rather than the “producers” who provided them with material incentives, or the mobile sound systems that made their recordings available to the masses and became a crucial part of the feedback loop on which they depended, it was Jamaica’s hard-working session musicians themselves who represented the primary creative interface between Jamaican popular music and the Jamaican people.
PERSONAL AS WELL AS professional predilections lie behind this book. Jamaican sounds have
