For decades, beginning in the 1920�s, the dominant music in the Caribbean was Trinidad-based
calypso. The lilting, topical and frequently risqu� songs were initially sung in an
African-French patois but began to switch to English as the music began to attract the
interest of American record labels such as Decca and Bluebird.
Post World War II saw the emergence of various Caribbean music forms, notably steel-pan
music of Trinidad and Tobago. In the late 40�s and early 50�s, Jamaican musicians began
combining the steel-pan and calypso strains with an indigenous mento beat (e.g. Harry
Belafonte - Jamaica Farewell).
During the 1950�s Jamaican youth was turning away from the American pop foisted on them by
Radio Jamaica Rediffusion (RJR) and the Jamaican Broadcasting Corporation (JBC). Weather
conditions permitting they listened instead to the sinewy music being played on New Orleans
stations or Miami�s powerful WINZ, whose playlists included records by Amos Milburn, Rosco
Gordon and Louis Jordan. Significant New Orleans artists of the time included Fats Domino,
Jelly Roll Morton, Champion Jack Dupree and Professor Longhair. It is surmised that the
delay effects which are an important part of the reggae/dub sound may have initially been
inspired by the oscillations in the signal from these far away radio stations.
During this period, Jamaican bands began covering U.S. R&B hits, but the more adventurous
took the nuts and bolts of the sound and melded them with energetic jazz conceits -
particularly in the ever-present horn section - and emerged around 1956 with a hybrid
concoction christened ska. Ernest Ranglin, the stellar jazz-rooted Jamaican
guitarist who backed up the Wailers on such ska classics as "Love and Affection" and "Cry
to Me," says that the word was coined by musicians "to talk about the skat! skat! skat!
scratchin� guitar strum that goes behind."
Practically overnight, ska spawned a major Jamaican industry, the Sound System, whereby
enterprising record shop D.J.�s with reliable U.S. connections for 45�s would load a pair
of hefty P.A. speakers into a pickup truck and tour the island from hilltop to savanna,
spinning the latest hits. D.J.�s also gave themselves comic book nom de plumes like Prince
Buster and Sir Coxsone Downbeat. Competition grew so heated that D.J.�s covered up labels
or scratched them off so that rivals couldn�t keep up with the latest sounds.
The ska craze spread to London in the late 1950�s and early 1960�s and in the United Kingdom
ska soon came to be labelled bluebeat. This music would probably have remained a
mere curiosity were it not for the efforts of a white Anglo-Jamaican of aristocratic
lineage named Chris Blackwell. As a hobby-like business venture he had set up a small scale
distribution network for ethnic records but he had a vision about the potential appeal of
Jamaica�s oscillating answer to the blues. In 1962 Blackwell took his tiny Blue Mountain/Island
label to England, purchased master tapes produced in Kingston and released them in Britain
on Black Swan, Jump Up, Sue and the parent label Island. Initial artists included Jimmy
Cliff, the Skatalites and Bob Marley.
In England Blackwell struck up a synergism with the fashion conscious mod and skinhead
teenage movements through his seminal Jamaican rock records. His big breakthrough came in
1964 when Millie Small, one of the artists he managed, had a huge U.S. hit with "My Boy
Lollipop."
Back in Jamaica "stay and ketch it again" became the rallying cry of Sound System ska. Soon
every "Rude Boy" (ghetto tough) and country orphan wanted to hear his own voice barrelling
out of a bass speaker. The Wailer�s first single "Simmer Down" was a ska smash in Jamaica
in late 1963/early 1964 and called on the island�s young hooligans to control their tempers.
The ska-bluebeat advance into what became rock steady occurred around 1966. James
Brown and funky U.S. stuff was cited by Bob Marley as an influence for "de young musicians,
deh had a different beat - dis was rock steady now! Eager to go! Du-du-du-du-du... Rock
steady goin� t�rough." Marley was right on target when he linked James Brown with the
transition, since R&B was to ska what soul was to rock steady.
As far as Jamaican record buyers were concerned, the origin of the word reggae was the 1968
Pyramid single by Toots and the Maytals "Do the Reggay" (sic). Other possibilities as to
the origin of the word include Regga, the name of a Bantu speaking tribe on Lake Tanganyika
and a corruption of "streggae," which is Kingston street slang for prostitute. According to
Bob Marley, the word is Spanish in origin, meaning "the king�s music" but according to
veteran session musicians the word is a description of the beat itself. Hux Brown of the
Skatalites and lead guitarist on Paul Simon�s 1972 hit "Mother and Child Reunion" says
that it is "just a fun, joke kinda word that means ragged rhythm and the body feeling."
By the 1970�s, the U.S. top 40 hosted several rock steady and early reggae hits, most
notably Desmond Dekker and the Aces anti-colonial diatribe "Israelites" (1969), Jimmy
Cliff�s "Wonderful World, Beautiful People" (1970) and Paul Simon�s "Mother and Child
Reunion" (1972), recorded in 1971 at Dynamic Studios, Kingston. This track in particular
helped spark a lively and lucrative cross fertilisation among prominent rock, R&B, punk,
disco, funk and New Wave artists during the 1970s and early 1980s.
During 1970 and 1971 a jumble of Wailers singles were fed to the Jamaican audience backed
by dub and "version" mixes of the A side. Osbourne "King Tubby" Ruddock was one of
the originators of dub. While working as a selector for Duke Reid�s Sound system and for
Treasure Isle studio, he began using a dub machine to eliminate vocals from test cuts of a
two track single, getting a private charge out of the way the rhythms - in the space of a
microsecond - seemed to snap, crackle and then pop like a champagne cork when they had no
vocal track to soften them. Equally exciting to him was the abrupt reintroduction of the
complete mix "Jus� like a volcano in yuh head!" Tubby would say.
Springing the effect on a crowded dance hall one evening to blow a few minds (and possibly
some speakers -since he liked the prankish ploy to be loud), the "dub-out" stunt was received
like a revelation on high. It soon became an essential novelty at the larger jump-ups and
then a standard fixture. Everybody began to examine the dub versions closely to determine
whether Kingston rhythm sections held their own when stripped naked. Tubby added echo and
reverb at ever more erratic intervals to enhance the "haunted house" effect of the stark trompings and backbeats going bump in the tropical night.
By late 1971, Kingstonians� appetites had been whetted for all-dub LPs and Lee Perry
provided a remixed dub of Soul Revolution called Soul Revolution II. Perry eventually got
so hooked on dub that he began layering sound effects (train whistles, running water,
animal noises) on just about every old track he had in his possession.
The Wailers had been quite successful commercially in the Caribbean during most of Jamaican
rock�s evolutionary phases but after signing with Island records in 1972, they issued a
string of well received albums on the internationally distributed Island label beginning
with Catch a Fire (1973).
Bob Marley and the Wailers� mesmerising and often incendiary songs were customarily steeped
in images of Third World strife and underscored by the turgid tenets of the Ratafarian
faith as well as by symbols and maxims derived from Jamaican and African folklore. Rastas
smoked "herb" to help with their meditations and the Rastafarian colours were richly symbolic: