This new release from Temple University Press is a great book for any reggae fan to own. It has a well-written and research section on the history and development of the music from its earliest folk beginnings to modern dancehall. Then it goes into a selection of hit songs through the years, explaining why they are important in the evolution of Jamaican music. Lastly, the book includes charts from Jamaican radio and glossaries.

This is a great book mainly because it is written by two Jamaicans, unlike the recent critical analyses of the music written by Brits and Americans. This gives a unique perspective to the music and will prove educational to non-Jamaican reggae fans who don't understand why the music developed as it did. Their defense of dancehall, which is so often maligned by foreigners, is fantastic.

In our continuing efforts to educate the masses on reggae history, we have reprinted here a chapter on the early days of sound systems and the earliest pre-ska recordings. --Lem


SOUND SYSTEM DAYS AND NIGHTS

Sound systems-essentially large, mobile discotheques playing at dances, house parties, fairs and nightclubs-were born of economic necessity. In 1950, a modest home record playback system which cost an American 5 percent of his yearly pay required roughly a full year's wages from the average Jamaican. Few among the poorer classes could afford any stereo system, much less one powerful enough to approximate the volume and fidelity of live performances.

As the only survivor of that early period, Clement "Coxsone" Dodd is often said to have invented the sound system concept. But according to the late Count Matchukie, the first real dancehall sound system was Tom "The Great" Sebastien, the 'nom de record' of the Chinese hardware merchant Thomas Wong: "There were other sets playing about the place, but Tom was the first sound with an amplifier properly balanced for the dancehall."

Tom "The Great" Sebastien started getting competition from Sir Coxsone Downbeat, Duke Reid "The Trojan," and Lloyd "The Matador" Daley. Tom was turned off by the violent rivalry among systems downtown and opened The Silver Slipper Club at Cross Roads. One day he committed suicide by gassing himself in his car, supposedly over financial troubles. Shortly after the Silver Slipper Club burnt to the ground.

The demand for sound systems stemmed from the escalation in temporary migration from Jamaica to the U.S. in the late 1940s. Migrant sugar cane cutters, contracted for six months to a year in the American south, introduced rhythm and blues to Jamaica and it proved hugely popular with the local public. Clement Dodd, an early 'cane cutter', saw the demand and bought his sound system equipment on his first trip. The new venture proved successful and on succeeding trips he enlarged his record collection and equipment, eventually setting up Sir Coxsone's Downbeat sound system, at the corner of Beeston Street and Love Lane in the heartof the inner city.

Coxsone recalls: "There were 14 dance halls on Maxfield Avenue alone. All those guys who hustled at the wharf used to come to those dances. People came from all Montego Bay to hear the sounds. Duke Reid and me were good friends at times, but he used to buy his guys too much liquor and cause all kinds of fights. Sometimes I had up to 5 different sets playing the same night at different places in the city. Admission was about 2s 6d."

Chris Blackwell gives an active player's view: "At about the time 'Oh Carolina' was released the sound systems were really burgeoning. They drove the Jamaican recording business, with their need to have the hottest records. When I went to New York in those days I used to buy the latest, most obscure 78s and cross off the labels and sell them to sound systems for vastly inflated amounts: the sound system that had the greatest records drew the biggest crowds."

There was intense rivalry between sounds, especially Downbeat and Trojan. To protect their exclusives, each set scratched off the title and artist on the record labels. Naturally competitor 'spies' tried to identify popular new records. Coxsone had a very popular theme song which dance fans called "Coxsone's Hop," but rival sets were unable to identify the real title. Duke Reid supposedly made 15 trips abroad before he found the record, "Later for Gator." When Coxsone heard Duke play the song, so the story goes, he passed out in shock. But there was a dark side to these dances. Rival sets were said to hire 'Dance Crashers' to 'mash up' the competition by starting fights at their dances and giving them a bad name.

With individual Jamaicans unable to afford a record playback system, the sound system was in effect a giant community record player. Chances are this collective listening environment shaped Jamaicans' musical tastes. Groups and individuals often prefer different types of music. And the same song can engender completely different feelings depending on whether it's heard while sitting still in the privacy of one's home or while dancing in the communal outdoors. Financial constraints have more than once forced Jamaican music into new and ultimately fruitful directions.

Sound systems in the 1950s played mainly American rhythm and blues. R&B's appeal to the Jamaican masses is easy to understand. Southern U.S. blacks and Jamaicans had both endured plantation slavery, and in the 1950s were experiencing similar social changes, such as the mass migration from country to city. Plus the average Jamaican could, to a great extent, identify with black R&B artists. Cultural historian Dick Hedbidge notes that the relaxed, loping style seemed to cater to the West Indian taste for unhurried rhythms. The R&B produced in the southern states of America had an almost Caribbean tinge and tended to be much less frantic than black ghetto music from the north.

Jamaicans preferred the "harder" R&B tunes, says Garth White, especially the crisp, sweet bands of New Orleans and their locomotive rhythm sections. Popular artists included Fats Domino, Shirley and Lee, Bill Doggett, Roscoe Gordon, Chuck Berry, Ernie Freeman, and probably the most influential, Louis Jordan. Interestingly, the electrified delta blues of Muddy Waters, Howling Wolf, or even B. B. King never was popular here. Maybe it was just geographic accident-Mississippi and Chicago being outside Jamaican travel routes at the time. It might be a matter of national psyche. Jamaicans have never been a brooding or introspective people and the general pessimism of the delta blues apparently strikes no chord within. Even today blues gets very little airplay in Jamaica. In fact 'blues' in Jamaica, while usually referring to rhythm and blues, can mean anything. The "Yellowman Sings The Blues" album included versions of Kenny Rogers' "The Gambler" and "Coward Of The County."

In the late 1950s black music in American music began to change, for the worse as far as Jamaicans were concerned. The golden age of R&B was ending as the rock and roll era began. Black American records became increasingly slick, self-conscious and soft in the attempt to 'cross over' and appeal to white audiences. The driving beat which moved the sound session dancers was weakening. Not that Jamaicans rejected R&B completely-Sam Cooke, The Drifters and The Impressions were and still are tremendously popular. But 'hard' tunes were becoming scarce and business began dropping at the dances.

In Coxsone's words: "American music started to change from rhythm and blues to rock and roll but Jamaicans didn't like rock and roll much. I searched the U.S. but the R&B supply was drying up. So I decided to record my own music starting with Roland Alphonso at Federal. I had a couple of sessions, basically tango and calypso and some rhythm and blues inclined sounds. I think the first one was "Shuffling Jug" by Clue J and the Blues Blasters, a kind of calypso. After the first three or four sessions the feedback was really good because the people started dancing. Basically we found a sound that was popular with the dance crowd in Jamaica and worked from there. The songs were really based on dancing."

Other sound system operators also cut their own tunes to try and satisfy their restless customers. Most early recordings were done at Ken Khouri's Federal Records, then the only studio in the island. Federal recorded almost anyone who wandered in. All you needed was a reasonably good song, a creditable voice and a producer to put up the money. The producer paid for the session time and hired the session musicians. After paying the singer perhaps twenty pounds and a master, the finished product was the producer's property. An unreasonable arrangement? The producer did take the risk.

Almost without exception, Jamaican musicians regard producers as crooks. Bitter stories abound, especially the one that runs to the tune of "I get ten pound for the record and it sell twenty thousand copies!" Of course, no one remembers the songs they were paid for which never sold a single copy. According to Coxsone Dodd, about 60 percent of the records he produced were never released. Exploitation and mistreatment were probably as common in the music business anywhere, but it's unlikely there was much money in the Jamaican recording industry before foreign markets opened up. A poor country of two million people and limited resources could never realistically support a large body of professional musicians.

As Alton Ellis says: "I said this and that then but now I think twice. Because the business wasn't that strong then. There was some money but not enough to go around or to satisfy the producer. Studio time was four pounds an hour and the musicians usually get fifteen pounds a song. You have to be god blessed to pick up any royalties, otherwise you keep singing every week for fifteen pounds a song. So sometimes I said I wasn't paid, but there wasn't a lot of money in it. You learn as you get older and realise." All in all, it could be asserted that older Jamaican musicians have been treated very shabbily by the business-when Jamaican records did begin selling abroad, very little of the proceeds made their way back to the persons who actually created the music-and more than a few reggae legends who continue to be lionised here and abroad have to eke out a hand to mouth existence.

The sound system operators had no intention of selling records when they began producing music. They simply wanted 'hard' tunes for their system dances, records which people would dance to. Naturally they attempted to reproduce the R&B sound popular at dance halls, but some calypso-mento type music was also tried. The earliest records are hard to define. As Clement Dodd puts it: "After a couple of times in the studio I found a sound that was popular with the dance crowd in Jamaica, and we worked from there."

According to Garth White, Jamaican music of the late 50s "proto-ska" period did not merely imitate R&B. Many songs of early artists like Cluet Johnson, Owen Gray, Wilfred Edwards, The Mellow Larks, The Magic Notes, The Maytals and Baba Brooks were clearly in the mento and Jamaica revivalist stream. Even when an R&B format was used, a very strong indigenous element is heard-as in the music of Bunny (Robinson) and Scully (Simms), Alton (Ellis) and Eddie (Perkins), Keith (Stewart) and Enid (Cumberland), Prince Buster, Derrick Morgan, Monty Morris, Theophilus Beckford, Neville Eason and The Jiving Juniors.

In 1958 former prime minister and current opposition leader Edward Seaga started WIRL (West Indies Recording Limited), issuing songs by popular local performers. Seaga had received an anthropology degree at Harvard in 1952 and had researched Kumina, Pocomania and Obeah practices. He supervised the sessions of a 1955 album of cult music for New York based Ethnic Folkways label and then moved into more commercial territory. WIRL's records copied the dominant American models: rhythmic ballads and jumping boogies. Seaga's recorded artists included Wilfred "Jackie" Edwards, Owen Gray, the Jiving Juniors (who included Derrick Harriot and Count Prince Miller as members) and the duo (Joe) Higgs and (Roy) Wilson. Higgs and Wilson's "Manny O" was a huge hit in 1960, selling a reported 30,000 copies. Seaga had other acts under contract, including Slim Smith and Byron Lee, who had a hit on the WIRL label with his debut single "Dumplings." According to Joe Higgs: "He was the best manager we ever had-we always got paid!"

Duke Reid and Clement Dodd held their first recording sessions in 1959. Reid's artists included the duo Chuck and Dobby, the Jiving Juniors, Derrick Morgan and Eric "Monty" Morris. Dodd recorded over a dozen tracks with singers like Alton (Ellis) and Eddie (Perkins), Beresford Ricketts, Lascelles Perkins and Theophilus Beckford. Alton Ellis recalls: "Eddie and I was about the ninth singer in Jamaica to be recorded. The others were Bunny and Scully, Laurel Aitken, Lord Tanamo, Owen Gray, Wilfred Edwards, Higgs and Wilson, "Easy Snappin" (Theophilus Beckford), and myself and Eddie…we were maybe seventh or eighth, but not more than ninth."

The first JBC record chart came out in August 1959 and all the entries were foreign. The first local record to make the charts was Laurel Aitken's "Boogie Rock" which debuted at number 18 on October 9. Two weeks later it moved to number one. The first ten local songs to chart were in order "Boogie Rock," "Comeback Jeannie," "Little Sheila," "Boogie In My Bones" (all by Laurel Aitken), "Manny O" (Higgs and Wilson), "Honey Girls" (Laurel Aitken), "Dumplings" (Byron Lee), "We're Gonna Love" (Wilfred Edwards), "Please Let Me Go" (Owen Gray) and "I For Love" (Owen Gray).

"Boogie In My Bones" and "Little Sheila" were A and B sides of the same record. Cut in one of Chris Blackwell's first production efforts, these songs are said to have spent over 12 months in the Jamaican charts. Other hit songs of the times were Derrick Morgan's "Now We Know," the Mellow Cats' "Rock A Man Soul" and the key transitional tune "Easy Snappin." Sung and played by Theophilus Beckford who was better known then and later as a piano player, "Easy Snappin" was a huge hit whose "oh so lazy" feel and emphasis on the off- beat were widely emulated and influential. It wasn't quite ska but neither was it just imitation R&B. Local records, through popular demand, finally began getting airplay. "Teenage Dance Party," produced by Jazz musician Sonny Bradshaw and originally playing only R&B, began to include local tunes.

Laurel Aitken, who once earned a living with the Jamaican Tourist Board, singing calypso to visitors alighting at Kingston Harbour, was the most important Jamaican singer of the pre-ska era and reflected all the developmental stages of the infant music. He first recorded with Stanley Motta's Caribbean Recording Company, cutting some calypso sides, the spiritual "Roll Jordan Roll," and "Boogie Rock." His late 1950s tunes, like "Boogie Rock," "Boogie In My Bones," "Comeback Jeannie," and "More Whisky," were heavily R&B influenced (his group was once called the Boogie Cats), but couched in Jamaican accents.

These accents were more pronounced in other early hits like "Little Sheila" and "Judgement Day," a key blend of Afro-Jamaican religious music, mento and R&B. He also performed songs rooted in Jamaican folk realities like "Baba Kill Me Goat A Line." Garth White considers his mento off-time, "Nightfall," a transitional record to the modern era. Aitken went to London in the early sixties along with other popular performers like Millie Small and Jackie Edwards, and became quite popular during the skinhead and Mod revivals of the late 1960s. He was still recording in the 1980s.

Derrick Morgan was another big star of the time whose songs changed as the experimental music sought its own identity. He did the Latin tinged "Fat Man" (1960), the Gospel oriented "I Pray For You" (1961), the shuffling R&B "Forward March" (1962), and settled into ska with "Shake A Leg" and "Blazing Fire."

While Jamaican nationalists insist that ska grew directly out of mento, many musicians and sound system operators considered R&B their virtual model and jazz their spiritual guide. But as Garth White says, neither extreme view can be coherently defended, and the truth is found between these varying poles. Many studio musicians did come out of a mento background. And audiences were not "digging" only Louis Jordan, because several early local recordings were mento-revivalist songs. On the other hand, Jamaican youths of the time saw mento as outdated "country" music.Yet if early Jamaican records were merely straight R&B covers, why did they sound strange even to blacks in the US? Clearly both types of music were incorporated into ska, the degree of emphasis depending on the performing artists.

Pamela O'Gorman sees a strong current of rural folk music, including mento and the revival strain, running through our popular music. To her, a song like "Shanty Town" is based almost entirely on a work-song form, with the sophisticated use of responsorial patterns successfully obscuring its rural background.

Jimmy Cliff confirms these influences: "I used to sing calypso in school as well as mento and other folklore music, for in the country you have like digging songs, burial songs, wedding songs-there were songs for every occasion. These kind of things seems to be dying out which is a pity, because it's such an integral part of our culture. All these things and people were my inspiration in writing songs."