Podcasts about Coxsone Dodd

Every transformation of music in Jamaica from 50s R&B & Mento, Ska to Rocksteady, Roots to Rockers, Dancehall to Digital - Studio One has been one of the driving forces of music.  Hour one, part one ( of a three-part series), looks at the origins of Coxsone Dodd and Studio one beginning with his Downbeat Soundsystem in 1954, to his first release in 1959 up until 1969.    1. Count Machuki - Scorcha 2. The Jolly Boys - Drip And Fall Back (Clip) 3. Clue J & The Blues Blasters - Shuffling Jug 4. Theo Beckford - Easy Snappin 5. The Wailers - Simmer Down 6. Any Whinehouse - Your Wondering Now (Clip) 7. The Specials - Your Wondering Now (Clip) 8. Andy & Joey - You're Wondering Now 9. Slim Smith - I'll Never Let You Go 10. Sound Dimension - Real Rock 11. Willi Williams - Armagideon 12. Bo Diddley - She's Fin, She's Mine ((Clip) 13. Willi Cobbs - You Don't Love Me ((Clip) 14. Dawn Penn - You Don't Love Me (No, No, No) (1967) 15. Dawn Penn - You Don't Love Me (No, No, No) (1994) (Clip) 16. Alton Ellis - I'm Still In Love 17. Althea & Donna - Uptown Top Ranking (Clip) 18. The Cables - Baby Why 17. Dennis Alcapone - Baby Why Version 18. King Tubby - Loving Dub

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/12/arts/music/prince-buster-trailblazer-of-ska-dies-at-78.htmlCecil Bustamente Campbell was born in Kingston, Jamaica, on May 24, 1938. He performed with teenage groups in Kingston; he also became a boxer, taking the name Prince Buster.In the 1950s he began working for one of Jamaica's top producers and sound-system disc jockeys, Coxsone Dodd. By the end of the decade he had opened a record store, Buster's Record Shack, and was playing street parties with his own sound system, the Voice of the People. He decided to start producing songs as well as spinning them.Jamaicans were listening to, and imitating, the American R&B that reached the island on radio stations from New Orleans and Miami. Prince Buster's productions were more deliberately Jamaican. His production of the Folkes Brothers' “Oh Carolina,” recorded in 1959, meshed the traditional Nyabinghi drumming of a Rastafarian musician, Count Ossie, with what would come to be known as a ska beat.That beat, in songs like Eric Morris's “Humpty Dumpty,” made for huge hits in Jamaica and also had an impact in 1960s Britain. Prince Buster's instrumental “Al Capone” was a Top 20 hit there in 1965.By the end of the 1960s ska had given way to the slower rocksteady beat, a closer precursor of reggae. Prince Buster adapted, notably with his series of singles using his Judge Dread character. But in the early 1970s he gave up producing music and concentrated on business ventures, including record stores and a jukebox company, and moved to Miami.

Drumming first hour then Carlton Livingston Like so many Jamaican artists, singer Carlton Livingston was first exposed to the joys of music in church. Born in 1962 in St. Mary, Jamaica, Livingston sang in choirs and in an informal harmony trio (which later morphed into Knowledge) before entering the music business in earnest when he recorded "The Tale of Two Cities" in 1978 at Channel One. He eventually ended up working with several of the top Jamaican producers, including Coxsone Dodd, Winston Riley, Sly & Robbie, Clive Jarrett, and King Jammy, among others. His signature song, "100 Weight of Collie Weed," was a huge island hit in 1984, and was the feature song on the subsequent album Fret Dem a Fret. Livingston recorded sparingly thereafter

durée : 00:29:54 - La Série musicale - par : Simon Rico - Après avoir exploré hier ses années de jeunesse, sous l'aile protectrice de Coxsone Dodd à Studio One, focus aujourd'hui sur la deuxième phase de la vie de Lee Perry, à la fin des sixties, quand il devient "the Upsetter", l'emmerdeur.

durée : 00:29:54 - La Série musicale - par : Simon Rico - Après avoir exploré hier ses années de jeunesse, sous l'aile protectrice de Coxsone Dodd à Studio One, focus aujourd'hui sur la deuxième phase de la vie de Lee Perry, à la fin des sixties, quand il devient "the Upsetter", l'emmerdeur.

Realizing fully that any exploration of Bob Marley & The Wailers is bound to be woefully incomplete, Markus and Ray undertook this musical journey with love and a keen interest to learn, and share... The story of Bob, Peter, Bunny, and Junior Braithwaite, whom the guys refer to as "the lost Wailer" is an amazing story in music history. Without digging deep into all things, the basic history is laid out here, with plans for further foraging!Please check out our sponsors:Boldfoot Socks   https://boldfoot.comCrooked Eye Brewery   https://crookedeyebrewery.com/ Don't forget that you can find all of our episodes, on-demand, for free right here on our web site: https://imbalancedhistory.com/ 

Every transformation of music in Jamaica from 50s R&B & Mento, Ska to Rocksteady, Roots to Rockers, Dancehall to Digital - Studio One has been one of the driving forces of music.  Hour one, part one ( of a three-part series), looks at the origins of Coxsone Dodd and Studio one beginning with his Downbeat Soundsystem in 1954, to his first release in 1959 up until 1969.  STUDIO ONE (PART ONE) PLAYLIST 1. Count Machuki - Scorcha 2. The Jolly Boys - Drip And Fall Back (Clip) 3. Clue J & The Blues Blasters - Shuffling Jug 4. Theo Beckford - Easy Snappin 5. The Wailers - Simmer Down 6. Any Whinehouse - Your Wondering Now (Clip) 7. The Specials - Your Wondering Now (Clip) 8. Andy & Joey - You're Wondering Now 9. Slim Smith - I'll Never Let You Go 10. Sound Dimension - Real Rock 11. Willi Williams - Armagideon 12. Bo Diddley - She's Fin, She's Mine ((Clip) 13. Willi Cobbs - You Don't Love Me ((Clip) 14. Dawn Penn - You Don't Love Me (No, No, No) (1967) 15. Dawn Penn - You Don't Love Me (No, No, No) (1994) (Clip) 16. Alton Ellis - I'm Still In Love 17. Althea & Donna - Uptown Top Ranking (Clip) 18. The Cables - Baby Why 17. Dennis Alcapone - Baby Why Version 18. King Tubby - Loving Dub   Download this episode and more @ www.bassmentsessions.com If you'd like to carry the show on your stations, please visit the above link and use the contact form to get in touch. 

Survol de la carrière The Heptones. Groupe légendaire jamaïcain principalement actif entre 1967-1995. Après avoir enregistré pendant 4 ans à Studio One, The Heptones mettent fin à leur collaboration avec Coxsone Dodd et enregistrerons avec plusieurs producteurs importants de l'île dans les années 70. En 1975, ils signent un contrat avec Island Records dont deux […]

Roots Rastafari Reggae with GalanJAH and guest Coxsone Dodd. Studio One. Featuring Skatelites.

Radio Nova revisite ses propres classiques : les raretés de tout bord qui rythment notre antenne, de la soul-funk au hip-hop en passant par les musiques afro-latines et la pop. Aujourd’hui : « Don’t Leave Me » de Delroy Wilson.Une reprise reggae de « Where Did Our Love Go », le premier hit de The Supremes, célèbre trio féminin de la Motown au sein duquel on retrouve Diana Ross.La version de Delroy Wilson sort au début des années 70, alors que le chanteur a déjà une belle carrière. Il a alors déjà accompagné les différentes évolutions de la musique jamaïcaine – enfant star, il commence à l’âge de treize ans – et a posé sa voix sur des morceaux de ska, puis de rocksteady, et enfin de reggae. Le soulman jamaïcain a fait ses gammes dans le studio de Coxsone Dodd, Studio One, à l’époque où Lee « Scratch » Perry produit pour Sir Coxsone. Delroy Wilson sortira d’ailleurs à ses débuts à Studio One de nombreux morceaux clashant Prince Buster, autre producteur de l’île. En 1966 sort « Dancing mood », son morceau qui sera l’un des titres majeurs du rocksteady. Son style, sa vibe enjouée, font de lui l’un des chanteurs les plus appréciés de l’époque et notamment par ses pairs, Ken Boothe en tête.Quand sort cette reprise des Supremes, Delroy Wilson a quitté le studio One et collabore avec son principal concurrent, Bunny Lee qui, à la fin des années 60, et avec l’aide d’un certain King Tubby, enchaîne hit sur hit. C’est donc chez celui que l’on surnomme le « striker » que Delroy Wilson sort ce reggae soul qu’il renomme « Don’t Leave Me ». Une reprise donc, exercice largement maitrisé par les Jamaïcains, qui ouvre le troisième volet des compilations Rare grooves reggae. Les ruptures ont toujours donné naissance à de merveilleux morceaux, démonstration avec notre Nova Classic du jour : « Don’t Leave Me » par Delroy Wilson sur Nova.Visuel © Go Away Dream de Delroy Wilson See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

This week’s episode looks at “My Boy Lollipop” and the origins of ska music. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “If You Wanna Be Happy” by Jimmy Soul. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ (more…)

This week’s episode looks at “My Boy Lollipop” and the origins of ska music. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “If You Wanna Be Happy” by Jimmy Soul. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ —-more—- Resources As usual, I have created a Mixcloud playlist containing every song heard in this episode — a content warning applies for the song “Bloodshot Eyes” by Wynonie Harris. The information about ska in general mostly comes from Bass Culture: When Reggae Was King by Lloyd Bradley, with some also from Reggae and Caribbean Music by Dave Thompson. Biographical information on Millie Small is largely from this article in Record Collector, plus a paywalled interview with Goldmine magazine (which I won’t link to because of the paywall). Millie’s early recordings with Owen Gray and Coxsone Dodd can be found on this compilation, along with a good selection of other recordings Dodd produced, while this compilation gives a good overview of her recordings for Island and Fontana. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Erratum I refer to “Barbara Gaye” when I should say “Barbie Gaye” Transcript Today, we’re going to take our first look at a form of music that would go on to have an almost incalculable influence on the music of the seventies, eighties, and later, but which at the time we’re looking at was largely regarded as a novelty music, at least in Britain and America. We’re going to look at the birth of ska, and at the first ska record to break big outside of Jamaica. We’re going to look at “My Boy Lollipop” by Millie: [Excerpt: Millie, “My Boy Lollipop”] Most of the music we’ve looked at so far in the podcast has been from either America or Britain, and I’m afraid that that’s going to remain largely the case — while there has been great music made in every country in the world, American and British musicians have tended to be so parochial, and have dominated the music industry so much, that relatively little of that music has made itself felt widely enough to have any kind of impact on the wider history of rock music, much to rock’s detriment. But every so often something from outside the British Isles or North America manages to penetrate even the closed ears of Anglo-American musicians, and today we’re going to look at one of those records. Now, before we start this, this episode is, by necessity, going to be dealing in broad generalisations — I’m trying to give as much information about Jamaica’s musical culture in one episode as I’ve given about America’s in a hundred, so I am going to have to elide a lot of details. Some of those details will come up in future episodes, as we deal with more Jamaican artists, but be aware that I’m missing stuff out. The thing that needs to be understood about the Jamaican music culture of the fifties and early sixties is that it developed in conditions of absolute poverty. Much of the music we looked at in the first year or so of the podcast came from extremely impoverished communities, of course, but even given how utterly, soul-crushingly, poor many people in the Deep South were, or the miserable conditions that people in Liverpool and London lived in while Britain was rebuilding itself after the war, those people were living in rich countries, and so still had access to some things that were not available to the poor people of poorer countries. So in Jamaica in the 1950s, almost nobody had access to any kind of record player or radio themselves. You wouldn’t even *know* anyone who had one, unlike in the states where if you were very poor you might not have one yourself, but your better-off cousin might let you come round and listen to the radio  at their house. So music was, by necessity, a communal experience.  Jamaican music, or at least the music in Kingston, the biggest city in Jamaica, was organised around  sound systems — big public open-air systems run by DJs, playing records for dancing. These had originally started in shops as a way of getting customers in, but soon became so popular that people started doing them on their own. These sound systems played music that was very different from the music played on the radio, which was aimed mostly at people rich enough to own radios, which at that time mostly meant white British people — in the fifties, Jamaica was still part of the British Empire, and there was an extraordinary gap between the music the white British colonial class liked and the music that the rest of the population liked.  The music that the Jamaican population *made* was mostly a genre called mento. Now, this is somewhere where my ignorance of this music compared to other musics comes into play a bit. There seem to have been two genres referred to as mento. One of them, rural mento, was based around instruments like the banjo, and a home-made bass instrument called a “rhumba box”, and had a resemblance to a lot of American country music or British skiffle — this form of mento is often still called “country music” in Jamaica itself: [Excerpt: The Hiltonaires, “Matilda”] There was another variant of mento, urban mento, which dropped the acoustic and home-made instruments and replaced them with the same sort of instruments that R&B or jazz bands used. Everything I read about urban mento says that it’s a different genre from calypso music, which generally comes from Trinidad and Tobago rather than Jamaica, but nothing explains what that difference is, other than the location. Mento musicians would also call their music calypso in order to sell it to people like me who don’t know the difference, and so you would get mento groups called things like Count Lasher and His Calypsonians, Lord Lebby and the Jamaica Calypsonians, and Count Owen and His Calypsonians, songs called things like “Hoola Hoop Calypso”, and mentions of calypso in the lyrics. I am fairly familiar with calypso music — people like the Mighty Sparrow, Lord Melody, Roaring Lion, and so on — and I honestly can’t hear any difference between calypso proper and mento records like this one, by Lord Power and Trenton Spence: [Excerpt: Lord Power and Trenton Spence, “Strip Tease”] But I’ll defer to the experts in these genres and accept that there’s a difference I’m not hearing. Mento was primarily a music for live performance, at least at first — there were very few recording facilities in Jamaica, and to the extent that records were made at all there, they were mostly done in very small runs to sell to tourists, who wanted a souvenir to take home. The music that the first sound systems played would include some mento records, and they would also play a fair number of latin-flavoured records. But the bulk of what they played was music for dancing, imported from America, made by Black American musicians, many of them the same musicians we looked at in the early months of this podcast. Louis Jordan was a big favourite, as was Wynonie Harris — the biggest hit in the early years of the sound systems was Harris’ “Bloodshot Eyes”. I’m going to excerpt that here, because it was an important record in the evolution of Jamaican music, but be warned that the song trivialises intimate partner violence in a way that many people might find disturbing. If you might be upset by that, skip forward exactly thirty seconds now: [Excerpt: Wynonie Harris, “Bloodshot Eyes”] The other artists who get repeatedly named in the histories of the early sound systems along with Jordan and Harris are Fats Domino, Lloyd Price, Professor Longhair — a musician we’ve not talked about in the podcast, but who made New Orleans R&B music in the same style as Domino and Price, and for slow-dancing the Moonglows and Jesse Belvin. They would also play jazz — Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington, and Sarah Vaughan were particular favourites. These records weren’t widely available in Jamaica — indeed, *no* records were really widely available . They found their way into Jamaica through merchant seamen, who would often be tasked by sound men with getting hold of new and exciting records, and paid with rum or marijuana. The “sound man” was the term used for the DJs who ran these sound systems, and they were performers as much as they were people who played records — they would talk and get the crowds going, they would invent dance steps and perform them, and they would also use the few bits of technology they had to alter the sound — usually by adding bass or echo. Their reputation was built by finding the most obscure records, but ones which the crowds would love. Every sound man worth his salt had a collection of records that nobody else had — if you were playing the same records that someone else had, you were a loser. As soon as a sound man got hold of a record, he’d scratch out all the identifying copy on the label and replace it with a new title, so that none of his rivals could get hold of their own copies. The rivalry between sound men could be serious — it started out just as friendly competition, with each man trying to build a bigger and louder system and draw a bigger crowd, but when the former policeman turned gangster Duke Reid started up his Trojan sound system, intimidating rivals with guns soon became par for the course. Reid had actually started out in music as an R&B radio DJ — one of the few in Jamaica — presenting a show whose theme song, Tab Smith’s “My Mother’s Eyes”, would become permanently identified with Reid: [Excerpt: Tab Smith, “My Mother’s Eyes”] Reid’s Trojan was one of the two biggest sound systems in Kingston, the other being Downbeat, run by Coxsone Dodd. Dodd’s system became so popular that he ended up having five different sound systems, all playing in different areas of the city every night, with the ones he didn’t perform at himself being run by assistants who later became big names in the Jamaican music world themselves, like Prince Buster and Lee “Scratch” Perry. Buster performed a few other functions for Dodd as well — one important one being that he  knew enough about R&B that he could go to Duke Reid’s shows, listen to the records he was playing, and figure out what they must be — he could recognise the different production styles of the different R&B labels well enough that he could use that, plus the lyrics, to work out the probable title and label of a record Reid was playing. Dodd would then get a merchant seaman to bring a copy of that record back from America, get a local record pressing plant to press up a bunch of copies of it, and sell it to the other sound men, thus destroying Reid’s edge. Eventually Prince Buster left Dodd and set up his own rival sound system, at which point the rivalry became a three-way one. Dodd knew about technology, and had the most powerful sound system with the best amps. Prince Buster was the best showman, who knew what the people wanted and gave it to them, and Duke Reid was connected and powerful enough that he could use intimidation to keep a grip on power, but he also had good enough musical instincts that his shows were genuinely popular in their own right. People started to see their favourite sound systems in the same way they see sports teams or political parties — as marks of identity that were worth getting into serious fights over. Supporters of one system would regularly attack supporters of another, and who your favourite sound system was *really mattered*. But there was a problem. While these systems were playing a handful of mento records, they were mostly relying on American records, and this had two problems. The most obvious was that if a record was available publicly, eventually someone else would find it. Coxsone Dodd managed to use one record, “Later For Gator” by Willis “Gatortail” Jackson, at every show for seven years, renaming it “Coxsone Hop”: [Excerpt: Willis “Gatortail” Jackson, “Later For Gator”] But eventually word got out that Duke Reid had tracked the song down and would play it at a dance. Dodd went along, and was allowed in unmolested — Reid wanted Dodd to know he’d been beaten.  Now, here I’m going to quote something Prince Buster said, and we hit a problem we’re likely to hit again when it comes to Jamaica. Buster spoke Jamaican Patois, a creole language that is mutually intelligible with, but different from, standard English. When quoting him, or any other Patois speaker, I have a choice of three different options, all bad. I could translate his words into standard English, thus misrepresenting him; I could read his words directly in my own accent, which has the problem that it can sound patronising, or like I’m mocking his language, because so much of Patois is to do with the way the words are pronounced; or I could attempt to approximate his own accent — which would probably come off as incredibly racist. As the least bad option of the three, I’m choosing the middle one here, and reading in my own accent, but I want people to be aware that this is not intended as mockery, and that I have at least given this some thought: “So we wait. Then as the clock struck midnight we hear “Baaap… bap da dap da dap, daaaa da daap!” And we see a bunch of them down from the dancehall coming up with the green bush. I was at the counter with Coxsone, he have a glass in him hand, he drop it and just collapse, sliding down the bar. I had to brace him against the bar, then get Phantom to give me a hand. The psychological impact had knocked him out. Nobody never hit him.” There was a second problem with using American records, as well — American musical tastes were starting to change, and Jamaican ones weren’t. Jamaican audiences wanted Louis Jordan, Fats Domino, and Gene & Eunice, but the Americans wanted Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis and Bobby Darin. For a while, the sound men were able to just keep finding more and more obscure old R&B and jump band records, but there was a finite supply of these, and they couldn’t keep doing it forever. The solution eventually became obvious — they needed Jamaican R&B. And thankfully there was a ready supply. Every week, there was a big talent contest in Kingston, and the winners would get five pounds — a lot of money in that time and place. Many of the winners would then go to a disc-cutting service, one of those places that would record a single copy of a song for you, and use their prize money to record themselves. They could then sell that record to one of the sound men, who would be sure that nobody else would have a copy of it. At first, the only sound men they could sell to were the less successful ones, who didn’t have good connections with American records. A local record was clearly not as good as an American one, and so the big sound systems wouldn’t touch it, but it was better than nothing, and some of the small sound systems would find that the local records were a success for them, and eventually the bigger systems would start using the small ones as a test audience — if a local record went down well at a small system, one of the big operators would get in touch with the sound man of that system and buy the record from him. One of the big examples of this was “Lollipop Girl”, a song by Derrick Harriott and Claudie Sang. They recorded that, with just a piano backing, and sold their only copy to a small sound system owner. It went down so well that the small sound man traded his copy with Coxsone Dodd for an American record — and it went down so well when Dodd played it that Duke Reid bribed one of Dodd’s assistants to get hold of Dodd’s copy long enough to get a copy made for himself. When Dodd and Reid played a sound clash — a show where they went head to head to see who could win a crowd over — and Reid played his own copy of “Lollipop Girl”, Dodd pulled a gun on Reid, and it was only the fact that the clash was next door to the police station that kept the two men from killing each other. Reid eventually wore out his copy of “Lollipop Girl”, he played it so much, and so he did the only sensible thing — he went into the record business himself, and took Harriott into the studio, along with a bunch of musicians from the local big bands, and cut a new version of it with a full band backing Harriott. As well as playing this on his sound system, Reid released it as a record: [Excerpt: Derrick Harriott, “Lollipop Girl”] Reid didn’t make many more records at this point, but both Coxsone Dodd and Prince Buster started up their own labels, and started hiring local singers, plus people from a small pool of players who became the go-to session musicians for any record made in Jamaica at the time, like trombone player Rico Rodriguez and guitarist Ernest Ranglin. During the late 1950s, a new form of music developed from these recordings, which would become known as ska, and there are three records which are generally considered to be milestones in its development. The first was produced by a white businessman, Edward Seaga, who is now more famous for becoming the Prime Minister of Jamaica in the 1980s. At the time, though, Seaga had the idea to incorporate a little bit of a mento rhythm into an R&B record he was producing. In most music, if you have a four-four rhythm, you can divide it into eight on-beats and off-beats, and you normally stress the on-beats, so you stress “ONE and TWO and THREE and FOUR and”. In mento, though, you’d often have a banjo stress the off-beats, so the stresses would be “one AND two AND three AND four AND”. Seaga had the guitarist on “Manny Oh” by Higgs and Wilson do this, on a track that was otherwise a straightforward New Orleans style R&B song with a tresillo bassline. The change in stresses is almost imperceptible to modern ears, but it made the record sound uniquely Jamaican to its audience: [Excerpt: Higgs and Wilson, “Manny Oh”] The next record in the sequence was produced by Dodd, and is generally considered the first real ska record. There are a few different stories about where the term “ska” came from, but one of the more believable is that it came from Dodd directing Ernest Ranglin, who was the arranger for the record, to stress the off-beat more, saying “play it ska… ska… ska…” Where “Manny Oh” had been a Jamaican sounding R&B record, “Easy Snappin'” is definitely a blues-influenced ska record: [Excerpt: Theo Beckford, “Easy Snappin'”] But Duke Reid and Coxsone Dodd, at this point, still saw the music they were making as a substitute for American R&B. Prince Buster, on the other hand, by this point was a full-fledged Black nationalist, and wanted to make a purely Jamaican music. Buster was, in particular, an adherent of the Rastafari religion, and he brought in five drummers from the Rasta Nyabinghi tradition, most notably Count Ossie, who became the single most influential drummer in Jamaica, to record on the Folkes brothers single “Oh Carolina”, incorporating the rhythms of Rasta sacred music into Jamaican R&B for the first time: [Excerpt: The Folkes Brothers, “Oh Carolina”] 1962 was a turning point in Jamaican music in a variety of ways. Most obviously, it was the year that Jamaica became independent from the British Empire, and was able to take control of its own destiny. But it was also the year that saw the first recordings of a fourteen-year-old girl who would become ska’s first international star. Millie Small had started performing at the age of twelve, when she won the Vere Johns Opportunity Hour, the single biggest talent contest in Kingston. But it was two years later that she came to the attention of Coxsone Dodd, who was very interested in her because her voice sounded spookily like that of Shirley, from the duo Shirley and Lee. We mentioned Shirley and Lee briefly back in the episode on “Ko Ko Mo”, but they were a New Orleans R&B duo who had a string of hits in the early and mid fifties, recorded at Cosimo Matassa’s studio, pairing Leonard Lee’s baritone voice with Shirley Goodman’s soprano. Their early records had been knock-offs of the sound that Little Esther had created with Johnny Otis and his male vocalists — for example Shirley and Lee’s “Sweethearts”: [Excerpt: Shirley and Lee, “Sweethearts”] bears a very strong resemblance to “Double-Crossing Blues”: [Excerpt: Little Esther, Johnny Otis, and the Robins, “Double-Crossing Blues”] But they’d soon developed a more New Orleans style, with records like “Feel So Good” showing some of the Caribbean influence that many records from the area had: [Excerpt: Shirley and Lee, “Feel So Good”] Shirley and Lee only had minor chart success in the US, but spawned a host of imitators, including Gene and Eunice and Mickey and Sylvia, both of whom we looked at in the early months of the podcast, and Ike and Tina Turner who will be coming up later. Like much New Orleans R&B, Shirley and Lee were hugely popular among the sound system listeners, and Coxsone Dodd thought that Mille’s voice sounded enough like Shirley’s that it would be worth setting her up as part of his own Shirley and Lee soundalike duo, pairing her with a more established singer, Owen Gray, to record songs like “Sit and Cry”, a song which combined the vocal sound of Shirley and Lee with the melody of “The Twist”: [Excerpt: Owen and Millie, “Sit and Cry”] After Gray decided to continue performing on his own, Millie was instead teamed with another performer, Roy Panton, and “We’ll Meet” by Roy and Millie went to number one in Jamaica: [Excerpt: Roy and Millie, “We’ll Meet”] Meanwhile, in the UK, there was a growing interest in music from the Caribbean, especially Jamaica. Until very recently, Britain had been a very white country — there have always been Black people in the UK, especially in port towns, but there had been very few. As of 1950, there were only about twenty thousand people of colour living in the UK. But starting in 1948, there had been a massive wave of immigration from other parts of what was then still the British Empire, as the government encouraged people to come here to help rebuild the country after the war. By 1961 there were nearly two hundred thousand Black people in Britain, almost all of them from the Caribbean.  Those people obviously wanted to hear the music of their own culture, and one man in particular was giving it to them. Chris Blackwell was a remarkably privileged man. His father had been one of the heirs to the Crosse and Blackwell fortune, and young Chris had been educated at Harrow, but when not in school he had spent much of his youth in Jamaica. His mother, Blanche, lived in Jamaica, where she was a muse to many men — Noel Coward based a character on her, in a play he wrote in 1956 but which was considered so scandalous that it wasn’t performed in public until 2012. Blanche attended the premiere of that play, when she was ninety-nine years old. She had an affair with Errol Flynn, and was also Ian Fleming’s mistress — Fleming would go to his Jamaican villa, GoldenEye, every year to write, leaving his wife at home (where she was having her own affairs, with the Labour MPs Hugh Gaitskell and Roy Jenkins), and would hook up with Blanche while he was there — according to several sources, Fleming based the characters of Pussy Galore and Honeychile Ryder on Blanche. After Fleming’s death, his wife instructed the villa’s manager that it could be rented to literally anyone except Blanche Blackwell, but in the mid-1970s it was bought by Bob Marley, who in turn sold it to Chris Blackwell. Chris Blackwell had developed a fascination with Rasta culture after having crashed his boat while sailing, and being rescued by some Rasta fishermen, and he had decided that his goal was to promote Jamaican culture to the world. He’d started his own labels, Island Records, in 1959, using his parents’ money, and had soon produced a Jamaican number one, “Boogie in My Bones”, by Laurel Aitken: [Excerpt: Laurel Aitken, “Boogie in My Bones”] But music was still something of a hobby with Blackwell, to the point that he nearly quit it altogether in 1962. He’d been given a job as a gopher on the first James Bond film, Dr. No, thanks to his family connections, and had also had a cameo role in the film. Harry Saltzman, the producer, offered him a job, but Blackwell went to a fortune teller who told him to stick with music, and he did. Soon after that, he moved back to England, where he continued running Island Records, this time as a distributor of Jamaican records. The label would occasionally record some tracks of its own, but it made its money from releasing Jamaican records, which Blackwell would hand-sell to local record shops around immigrant communities in London, Manchester, and Birmingham. Island was not the biggest of the labels releasing Jamaican music in Britain at the time — there was another label, Blue Beat, which got most of the big records, and which was so popular that in Britain “bluebeat” became a common term for ska, used to describe the whole genre, in the same way as Motown might be. And ska was becoming popular enough that there was also local ska being made, by Jamaican musicians living in Britain, and it was starting to chart. The first ska record to hit the charts in Britain was a cover of a Jimmy Cliff song, “King of Kings”, performed by Ezz Reco and the Launchers: [Excerpt: Ezz Reco and the Launchers, “King of Kings”] That made the lower reaches of the top forty, and soon after came “Mockingbird Hill”, a ska remake of an old Les Paul and Mary Ford hit, recorded by the Migil Five, a white British R&B group whose main claim to fame was that one of them was Charlie Watts’ uncle, and Watts had occasionally filled in on drums for them before joining the Rolling Stones: [Excerpt: Migil Five, “Mockingbird Hill”] That made the top ten. Ska was becoming the in sound in Britain, to the point that in March 1964, the same month that “Mockingbird Hill” was released, the Beatles made a brief detour into ska in the instrumental break to “I Call Your Name”: [Excerpt: The Beatles, “I Call Your Name”] And it was into this atmosphere that Chris Blackwell decided to introduce Millie. Her early records had been selling well enough for him that in 1963 he had decided to call Millie’s mother and promise her that if her daughter came over to the UK, he would be able to make her into a star. Rather than release her records on Island, which didn’t have any wide distribution, he decided to license them to Fontana, a mid-sized British label. Millie’s first British single, “Don’t You Know”, was released in late 1963, and was standard British pop music of the time, with little to distinguish it, and so unsurprisingly it wasn’t a hit: [Excerpt: Millie, “Don’t You Know”] But the second single was something different. For that, Blackwell remembered a song that had been popular among the sound systems a few years earlier; an American record by a white singer named Barbara Gaye. Up to this point, Gaye’s biggest claim to fame had been that Ellie Greenwich had liked this record enough that she’d briefly performed under the stage name Ellie Gaye, before deciding against that. “My Boy Lollipop” had been written by Robert Spencer of the Cadillacs, the doo-wop group whose biggest hit had been “Speedoo”: [Excerpt: The Cadillacs, “Speedoo”] Spencer had written “My Boy Lollipop”, but lost the rights to it in a card game — and then Morris Levy bought the rights from the winner for a hundred dollars. Levy changed the songwriting credit to feature a mob acquaintance of his, Johnny Roberts, and then passed the song to Gaetano Vastola, another mobster, who had it recorded by Gaye, a teenage girl he managed, with the backing provided by the normal New York R&B session players, like Big Al Sears and Panama Francis: [Excerpt: Barbie Gaye, “My Boy Lollipop”] That hadn’t been a hit when it was released in 1956, but it had later been picked up by the Jamaican sound men, partly because of its resemblance to the ska style, and Blackwell had a tape recording of it. Blackwell got Ernest Ranglin, who had also worked on Dr. No, and who had moved over to the UK at the same time as Blackwell, to come up with an arrangement, and Ranglin hired a local band to perform the instrumental backing. That band, Jimmy Powell and the Five Dimensions, had previously been known as the Moontrekkers, and had worked with Joe Meek, recording “Night of the Vampire”: [Excerpt: The Moontrekkers, “Night of the Vampire”] Ranglin replaced the saxophone solo from the original record with a harmonica solo, to fit the current fad for the harmonica in the British charts, and there is some dispute about who played it, but Millie always insisted that it was the Five Dimensions’ harmonica player, Rod Stewart, though Stewart denies it: [Excerpt: Millie, “My Boy Lollipop”] “My Boy Lollipop” came out in early 1964 and became a massive hit, reaching number two on the charts both in the UK and the US, and Millie was now a star. She got her own UK TV special, as well as appearing on Around The Beatles, a special starring the Beatles and produced by Jack Good. She was romantically linked to Peter Asher of Peter and Gordon. Her next single, though, “Sweet William”, only made number thirty, as the brief first wave of interest in ska among the white public subsided: [Excerpt: Millie, “Sweet William”] Over the next few years, there were many attempts made to get her back in the charts, but the last thing that came near was a remake of “Bloodshot Eyes”, without the intimate partner violence references, which made number forty-eight on the UK charts at the end of 1965: [Excerpt: Millie, “Bloodshot Eyes”] She was also teamed with other artists in an attempt to replicate her success as a duet act. She recorded with Jimmy Cliff: [Excerpt: Millie and Jimmy Cliff, “Hey Boy, Hey Girl”] and Jackie Edwards: [Excerpt: Jackie and Millie, “Pledging My Love”] and she was also teamed with a rock group Blackwell had discovered, and who would soon become big stars themselves with versions of songs by Edwards, on a cover version of Ike and Tina Turner’s “I’m Blue (the Gong Gong Song)”: [Excerpt: The Spencer Davis Group, “I’m Blue (The Gong Gong Song)”] But the Spencer Davis Group didn’t revive her fortunes, and she moved on to a succession of smaller labels, with her final recordings coming in the early 1970s, when she recorded the track “Enoch Power”, in response to the racism stirred up by the right-wing politician Enoch Powell: [Excerpt: Millie Small, “Enoch Power”] Millie spent much of the next few decades in poverty. There was talk of a comeback in the early eighties, after the British ska revival group Bad Manners had a top ten hit with a gender-flipped remake of “My Boy Lollipop”: [Excerpt: Bad Manners, “My Girl Lollipop”] But she never performed again after the early seventies, and other than one brief interview in 2016 she kept her life private. She was given multiple honours by the people of Jamaica, including being made a Commander in the Order of Distinction, but never really got any financial benefit from her enormous chart success, or from being the first Jamaican artist to make an impact on Britain and America. She died last year, aged seventy-two.

This week's episode looks at "My Boy Lollipop" and the origins of ska music. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "If You Wanna Be Happy" by Jimmy Soul. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ ----more---- Resources As usual, I have created a Mixcloud playlist containing every song heard in this episode -- a content warning applies for the song "Bloodshot Eyes" by Wynonie Harris. The information about ska in general mostly comes from Bass Culture: When Reggae Was King by Lloyd Bradley, with some also from Reggae and Caribbean Music by Dave Thompson. Biographical information on Millie Small is largely from this article in Record Collector, plus a paywalled interview with Goldmine magazine (which I won't link to because of the paywall). Millie's early recordings with Owen Gray and Coxsone Dodd can be found on this compilation, along with a good selection of other recordings Dodd produced, while this compilation gives a good overview of her recordings for Island and Fontana. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Erratum I refer to "Barbara Gaye" when I should say "Barbie Gaye" Transcript Today, we're going to take our first look at a form of music that would go on to have an almost incalculable influence on the music of the seventies, eighties, and later, but which at the time we're looking at was largely regarded as a novelty music, at least in Britain and America. We're going to look at the birth of ska, and at the first ska record to break big outside of Jamaica. We're going to look at "My Boy Lollipop" by Millie: [Excerpt: Millie, "My Boy Lollipop"] Most of the music we've looked at so far in the podcast has been from either America or Britain, and I'm afraid that that's going to remain largely the case -- while there has been great music made in every country in the world, American and British musicians have tended to be so parochial, and have dominated the music industry so much, that relatively little of that music has made itself felt widely enough to have any kind of impact on the wider history of rock music, much to rock's detriment. But every so often something from outside the British Isles or North America manages to penetrate even the closed ears of Anglo-American musicians, and today we're going to look at one of those records. Now, before we start this, this episode is, by necessity, going to be dealing in broad generalisations -- I'm trying to give as much information about Jamaica's musical culture in one episode as I've given about America's in a hundred, so I am going to have to elide a lot of details. Some of those details will come up in future episodes, as we deal with more Jamaican artists, but be aware that I'm missing stuff out. The thing that needs to be understood about the Jamaican music culture of the fifties and early sixties is that it developed in conditions of absolute poverty. Much of the music we looked at in the first year or so of the podcast came from extremely impoverished communities, of course, but even given how utterly, soul-crushingly, poor many people in the Deep South were, or the miserable conditions that people in Liverpool and London lived in while Britain was rebuilding itself after the war, those people were living in rich countries, and so still had access to some things that were not available to the poor people of poorer countries. So in Jamaica in the 1950s, almost nobody had access to any kind of record player or radio themselves. You wouldn't even *know* anyone who had one, unlike in the states where if you were very poor you might not have one yourself, but your better-off cousin might let you come round and listen to the radio  at their house. So music was, by necessity, a communal experience.  Jamaican music, or at least the music in Kingston, the biggest city in Jamaica, was organised around  sound systems -- big public open-air systems run by DJs, playing records for dancing. These had originally started in shops as a way of getting customers in, but soon became so popular that people started doing them on their own. These sound systems played music that was very different from the music played on the radio, which was aimed mostly at people rich enough to own radios, which at that time mostly meant white British people -- in the fifties, Jamaica was still part of the British Empire, and there was an extraordinary gap between the music the white British colonial class liked and the music that the rest of the population liked.  The music that the Jamaican population *made* was mostly a genre called mento. Now, this is somewhere where my ignorance of this music compared to other musics comes into play a bit. There seem to have been two genres referred to as mento. One of them, rural mento, was based around instruments like the banjo, and a home-made bass instrument called a "rhumba box", and had a resemblance to a lot of American country music or British skiffle -- this form of mento is often still called "country music" in Jamaica itself: [Excerpt: The Hiltonaires, "Matilda"] There was another variant of mento, urban mento, which dropped the acoustic and home-made instruments and replaced them with the same sort of instruments that R&B or jazz bands used. Everything I read about urban mento says that it's a different genre from calypso music, which generally comes from Trinidad and Tobago rather than Jamaica, but nothing explains what that difference is, other than the location. Mento musicians would also call their music calypso in order to sell it to people like me who don't know the difference, and so you would get mento groups called things like Count Lasher and His Calypsonians, Lord Lebby and the Jamaica Calypsonians, and Count Owen and His Calypsonians, songs called things like "Hoola Hoop Calypso", and mentions of calypso in the lyrics. I am fairly familiar with calypso music -- people like the Mighty Sparrow, Lord Melody, Roaring Lion, and so on -- and I honestly can't hear any difference between calypso proper and mento records like this one, by Lord Power and Trenton Spence: [Excerpt: Lord Power and Trenton Spence, "Strip Tease"] But I'll defer to the experts in these genres and accept that there's a difference I'm not hearing. Mento was primarily a music for live performance, at least at first -- there were very few recording facilities in Jamaica, and to the extent that records were made at all there, they were mostly done in very small runs to sell to tourists, who wanted a souvenir to take home. The music that the first sound systems played would include some mento records, and they would also play a fair number of latin-flavoured records. But the bulk of what they played was music for dancing, imported from America, made by Black American musicians, many of them the same musicians we looked at in the early months of this podcast. Louis Jordan was a big favourite, as was Wynonie Harris -- the biggest hit in the early years of the sound systems was Harris' "Bloodshot Eyes". I'm going to excerpt that here, because it was an important record in the evolution of Jamaican music, but be warned that the song trivialises intimate partner violence in a way that many people might find disturbing. If you might be upset by that, skip forward exactly thirty seconds now: [Excerpt: Wynonie Harris, "Bloodshot Eyes"] The other artists who get repeatedly named in the histories of the early sound systems along with Jordan and Harris are Fats Domino, Lloyd Price, Professor Longhair -- a musician we've not talked about in the podcast, but who made New Orleans R&B music in the same style as Domino and Price, and for slow-dancing the Moonglows and Jesse Belvin. They would also play jazz -- Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington, and Sarah Vaughan were particular favourites. These records weren't widely available in Jamaica -- indeed, *no* records were really widely available . They found their way into Jamaica through merchant seamen, who would often be tasked by sound men with getting hold of new and exciting records, and paid with rum or marijuana. The "sound man" was the term used for the DJs who ran these sound systems, and they were performers as much as they were people who played records -- they would talk and get the crowds going, they would invent dance steps and perform them, and they would also use the few bits of technology they had to alter the sound -- usually by adding bass or echo. Their reputation was built by finding the most obscure records, but ones which the crowds would love. Every sound man worth his salt had a collection of records that nobody else had -- if you were playing the same records that someone else had, you were a loser. As soon as a sound man got hold of a record, he'd scratch out all the identifying copy on the label and replace it with a new title, so that none of his rivals could get hold of their own copies. The rivalry between sound men could be serious -- it started out just as friendly competition, with each man trying to build a bigger and louder system and draw a bigger crowd, but when the former policeman turned gangster Duke Reid started up his Trojan sound system, intimidating rivals with guns soon became par for the course. Reid had actually started out in music as an R&B radio DJ -- one of the few in Jamaica -- presenting a show whose theme song, Tab Smith's "My Mother's Eyes", would become permanently identified with Reid: [Excerpt: Tab Smith, "My Mother's Eyes"] Reid's Trojan was one of the two biggest sound systems in Kingston, the other being Downbeat, run by Coxsone Dodd. Dodd's system became so popular that he ended up having five different sound systems, all playing in different areas of the city every night, with the ones he didn't perform at himself being run by assistants who later became big names in the Jamaican music world themselves, like Prince Buster and Lee "Scratch" Perry. Buster performed a few other functions for Dodd as well -- one important one being that he  knew enough about R&B that he could go to Duke Reid's shows, listen to the records he was playing, and figure out what they must be -- he could recognise the different production styles of the different R&B labels well enough that he could use that, plus the lyrics, to work out the probable title and label of a record Reid was playing. Dodd would then get a merchant seaman to bring a copy of that record back from America, get a local record pressing plant to press up a bunch of copies of it, and sell it to the other sound men, thus destroying Reid's edge. Eventually Prince Buster left Dodd and set up his own rival sound system, at which point the rivalry became a three-way one. Dodd knew about technology, and had the most powerful sound system with the best amps. Prince Buster was the best showman, who knew what the people wanted and gave it to them, and Duke Reid was connected and powerful enough that he could use intimidation to keep a grip on power, but he also had good enough musical instincts that his shows were genuinely popular in their own right. People started to see their favourite sound systems in the same way they see sports teams or political parties -- as marks of identity that were worth getting into serious fights over. Supporters of one system would regularly attack supporters of another, and who your favourite sound system was *really mattered*. But there was a problem. While these systems were playing a handful of mento records, they were mostly relying on American records, and this had two problems. The most obvious was that if a record was available publicly, eventually someone else would find it. Coxsone Dodd managed to use one record, "Later For Gator" by Willis "Gatortail" Jackson, at every show for seven years, renaming it "Coxsone Hop": [Excerpt: Willis "Gatortail" Jackson, "Later For Gator"] But eventually word got out that Duke Reid had tracked the song down and would play it at a dance. Dodd went along, and was allowed in unmolested -- Reid wanted Dodd to know he'd been beaten.  Now, here I'm going to quote something Prince Buster said, and we hit a problem we're likely to hit again when it comes to Jamaica. Buster spoke Jamaican Patois, a creole language that is mutually intelligible with, but different from, standard English. When quoting him, or any other Patois speaker, I have a choice of three different options, all bad. I could translate his words into standard English, thus misrepresenting him; I could read his words directly in my own accent, which has the problem that it can sound patronising, or like I'm mocking his language, because so much of Patois is to do with the way the words are pronounced; or I could attempt to approximate his own accent -- which would probably come off as incredibly racist. As the least bad option of the three, I'm choosing the middle one here, and reading in my own accent, but I want people to be aware that this is not intended as mockery, and that I have at least given this some thought: "So we wait. Then as the clock struck midnight we hear “Baaap… bap da dap da dap, daaaa da daap!” And we see a bunch of them down from the dancehall coming up with the green bush. I was at the counter with Coxsone, he have a glass in him hand, he drop it and just collapse, sliding down the bar. I had to brace him against the bar, then get Phantom to give me a hand. The psychological impact had knocked him out. Nobody never hit him." There was a second problem with using American records, as well -- American musical tastes were starting to change, and Jamaican ones weren't. Jamaican audiences wanted Louis Jordan, Fats Domino, and Gene & Eunice, but the Americans wanted Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis and Bobby Darin. For a while, the sound men were able to just keep finding more and more obscure old R&B and jump band records, but there was a finite supply of these, and they couldn't keep doing it forever. The solution eventually became obvious -- they needed Jamaican R&B. And thankfully there was a ready supply. Every week, there was a big talent contest in Kingston, and the winners would get five pounds -- a lot of money in that time and place. Many of the winners would then go to a disc-cutting service, one of those places that would record a single copy of a song for you, and use their prize money to record themselves. They could then sell that record to one of the sound men, who would be sure that nobody else would have a copy of it. At first, the only sound men they could sell to were the less successful ones, who didn't have good connections with American records. A local record was clearly not as good as an American one, and so the big sound systems wouldn't touch it, but it was better than nothing, and some of the small sound systems would find that the local records were a success for them, and eventually the bigger systems would start using the small ones as a test audience -- if a local record went down well at a small system, one of the big operators would get in touch with the sound man of that system and buy the record from him. One of the big examples of this was "Lollipop Girl", a song by Derrick Harriott and Claudie Sang. They recorded that, with just a piano backing, and sold their only copy to a small sound system owner. It went down so well that the small sound man traded his copy with Coxsone Dodd for an American record -- and it went down so well when Dodd played it that Duke Reid bribed one of Dodd's assistants to get hold of Dodd's copy long enough to get a copy made for himself. When Dodd and Reid played a sound clash -- a show where they went head to head to see who could win a crowd over -- and Reid played his own copy of "Lollipop Girl", Dodd pulled a gun on Reid, and it was only the fact that the clash was next door to the police station that kept the two men from killing each other. Reid eventually wore out his copy of "Lollipop Girl", he played it so much, and so he did the only sensible thing -- he went into the record business himself, and took Harriott into the studio, along with a bunch of musicians from the local big bands, and cut a new version of it with a full band backing Harriott. As well as playing this on his sound system, Reid released it as a record: [Excerpt: Derrick Harriott, "Lollipop Girl"] Reid didn't make many more records at this point, but both Coxsone Dodd and Prince Buster started up their own labels, and started hiring local singers, plus people from a small pool of players who became the go-to session musicians for any record made in Jamaica at the time, like trombone player Rico Rodriguez and guitarist Ernest Ranglin. During the late 1950s, a new form of music developed from these recordings, which would become known as ska, and there are three records which are generally considered to be milestones in its development. The first was produced by a white businessman, Edward Seaga, who is now more famous for becoming the Prime Minister of Jamaica in the 1980s. At the time, though, Seaga had the idea to incorporate a little bit of a mento rhythm into an R&B record he was producing. In most music, if you have a four-four rhythm, you can divide it into eight on-beats and off-beats, and you normally stress the on-beats, so you stress "ONE and TWO and THREE and FOUR and". In mento, though, you'd often have a banjo stress the off-beats, so the stresses would be "one AND two AND three AND four AND". Seaga had the guitarist on "Manny Oh" by Higgs and Wilson do this, on a track that was otherwise a straightforward New Orleans style R&B song with a tresillo bassline. The change in stresses is almost imperceptible to modern ears, but it made the record sound uniquely Jamaican to its audience: [Excerpt: Higgs and Wilson, "Manny Oh"] The next record in the sequence was produced by Dodd, and is generally considered the first real ska record. There are a few different stories about where the term "ska" came from, but one of the more believable is that it came from Dodd directing Ernest Ranglin, who was the arranger for the record, to stress the off-beat more, saying "play it ska... ska... ska..." Where "Manny Oh" had been a Jamaican sounding R&B record, "Easy Snappin'" is definitely a blues-influenced ska record: [Excerpt: Theo Beckford, "Easy Snappin'"] But Duke Reid and Coxsone Dodd, at this point, still saw the music they were making as a substitute for American R&B. Prince Buster, on the other hand, by this point was a full-fledged Black nationalist, and wanted to make a purely Jamaican music. Buster was, in particular, an adherent of the Rastafari religion, and he brought in five drummers from the Rasta Nyabinghi tradition, most notably Count Ossie, who became the single most influential drummer in Jamaica, to record on the Folkes brothers single "Oh Carolina", incorporating the rhythms of Rasta sacred music into Jamaican R&B for the first time: [Excerpt: The Folkes Brothers, "Oh Carolina"] 1962 was a turning point in Jamaican music in a variety of ways. Most obviously, it was the year that Jamaica became independent from the British Empire, and was able to take control of its own destiny. But it was also the year that saw the first recordings of a fourteen-year-old girl who would become ska's first international star. Millie Small had started performing at the age of twelve, when she won the Vere Johns Opportunity Hour, the single biggest talent contest in Kingston. But it was two years later that she came to the attention of Coxsone Dodd, who was very interested in her because her voice sounded spookily like that of Shirley, from the duo Shirley and Lee. We mentioned Shirley and Lee briefly back in the episode on "Ko Ko Mo", but they were a New Orleans R&B duo who had a string of hits in the early and mid fifties, recorded at Cosimo Matassa's studio, pairing Leonard Lee's baritone voice with Shirley Goodman's soprano. Their early records had been knock-offs of the sound that Little Esther had created with Johnny Otis and his male vocalists -- for example Shirley and Lee's "Sweethearts": [Excerpt: Shirley and Lee, "Sweethearts"] bears a very strong resemblance to "Double-Crossing Blues": [Excerpt: Little Esther, Johnny Otis, and the Robins, "Double-Crossing Blues"] But they'd soon developed a more New Orleans style, with records like "Feel So Good" showing some of the Caribbean influence that many records from the area had: [Excerpt: Shirley and Lee, "Feel So Good"] Shirley and Lee only had minor chart success in the US, but spawned a host of imitators, including Gene and Eunice and Mickey and Sylvia, both of whom we looked at in the early months of the podcast, and Ike and Tina Turner who will be coming up later. Like much New Orleans R&B, Shirley and Lee were hugely popular among the sound system listeners, and Coxsone Dodd thought that Mille's voice sounded enough like Shirley's that it would be worth setting her up as part of his own Shirley and Lee soundalike duo, pairing her with a more established singer, Owen Gray, to record songs like "Sit and Cry", a song which combined the vocal sound of Shirley and Lee with the melody of "The Twist": [Excerpt: Owen and Millie, "Sit and Cry"] After Gray decided to continue performing on his own, Millie was instead teamed with another performer, Roy Panton, and "We'll Meet" by Roy and Millie went to number one in Jamaica: [Excerpt: Roy and Millie, "We'll Meet"] Meanwhile, in the UK, there was a growing interest in music from the Caribbean, especially Jamaica. Until very recently, Britain had been a very white country -- there have always been Black people in the UK, especially in port towns, but there had been very few. As of 1950, there were only about twenty thousand people of colour living in the UK. But starting in 1948, there had been a massive wave of immigration from other parts of what was then still the British Empire, as the government encouraged people to come here to help rebuild the country after the war. By 1961 there were nearly two hundred thousand Black people in Britain, almost all of them from the Caribbean.  Those people obviously wanted to hear the music of their own culture, and one man in particular was giving it to them. Chris Blackwell was a remarkably privileged man. His father had been one of the heirs to the Crosse and Blackwell fortune, and young Chris had been educated at Harrow, but when not in school he had spent much of his youth in Jamaica. His mother, Blanche, lived in Jamaica, where she was a muse to many men -- Noel Coward based a character on her, in a play he wrote in 1956 but which was considered so scandalous that it wasn't performed in public until 2012. Blanche attended the premiere of that play, when she was ninety-nine years old. She had an affair with Errol Flynn, and was also Ian Fleming's mistress -- Fleming would go to his Jamaican villa, GoldenEye, every year to write, leaving his wife at home (where she was having her own affairs, with the Labour MPs Hugh Gaitskell and Roy Jenkins), and would hook up with Blanche while he was there -- according to several sources, Fleming based the characters of Pussy Galore and Honeychile Ryder on Blanche. After Fleming's death, his wife instructed the villa's manager that it could be rented to literally anyone except Blanche Blackwell, but in the mid-1970s it was bought by Bob Marley, who in turn sold it to Chris Blackwell. Chris Blackwell had developed a fascination with Rasta culture after having crashed his boat while sailing, and being rescued by some Rasta fishermen, and he had decided that his goal was to promote Jamaican culture to the world. He'd started his own labels, Island Records, in 1959, using his parents' money, and had soon produced a Jamaican number one, "Boogie in My Bones", by Laurel Aitken: [Excerpt: Laurel Aitken, "Boogie in My Bones"] But music was still something of a hobby with Blackwell, to the point that he nearly quit it altogether in 1962. He'd been given a job as a gopher on the first James Bond film, Dr. No, thanks to his family connections, and had also had a cameo role in the film. Harry Saltzman, the producer, offered him a job, but Blackwell went to a fortune teller who told him to stick with music, and he did. Soon after that, he moved back to England, where he continued running Island Records, this time as a distributor of Jamaican records. The label would occasionally record some tracks of its own, but it made its money from releasing Jamaican records, which Blackwell would hand-sell to local record shops around immigrant communities in London, Manchester, and Birmingham. Island was not the biggest of the labels releasing Jamaican music in Britain at the time -- there was another label, Blue Beat, which got most of the big records, and which was so popular that in Britain "bluebeat" became a common term for ska, used to describe the whole genre, in the same way as Motown might be. And ska was becoming popular enough that there was also local ska being made, by Jamaican musicians living in Britain, and it was starting to chart. The first ska record to hit the charts in Britain was a cover of a Jimmy Cliff song, "King of Kings", performed by Ezz Reco and the Launchers: [Excerpt: Ezz Reco and the Launchers, "King of Kings"] That made the lower reaches of the top forty, and soon after came "Mockingbird Hill", a ska remake of an old Les Paul and Mary Ford hit, recorded by the Migil Five, a white British R&B group whose main claim to fame was that one of them was Charlie Watts' uncle, and Watts had occasionally filled in on drums for them before joining the Rolling Stones: [Excerpt: Migil Five, "Mockingbird Hill"] That made the top ten. Ska was becoming the in sound in Britain, to the point that in March 1964, the same month that "Mockingbird Hill" was released, the Beatles made a brief detour into ska in the instrumental break to "I Call Your Name": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I Call Your Name"] And it was into this atmosphere that Chris Blackwell decided to introduce Millie. Her early records had been selling well enough for him that in 1963 he had decided to call Millie's mother and promise her that if her daughter came over to the UK, he would be able to make her into a star. Rather than release her records on Island, which didn't have any wide distribution, he decided to license them to Fontana, a mid-sized British label. Millie's first British single, "Don't You Know", was released in late 1963, and was standard British pop music of the time, with little to distinguish it, and so unsurprisingly it wasn't a hit: [Excerpt: Millie, "Don't You Know"] But the second single was something different. For that, Blackwell remembered a song that had been popular among the sound systems a few years earlier; an American record by a white singer named Barbara Gaye. Up to this point, Gaye's biggest claim to fame had been that Ellie Greenwich had liked this record enough that she'd briefly performed under the stage name Ellie Gaye, before deciding against that. "My Boy Lollipop" had been written by Robert Spencer of the Cadillacs, the doo-wop group whose biggest hit had been "Speedoo": [Excerpt: The Cadillacs, "Speedoo"] Spencer had written “My Boy Lollipop”, but lost the rights to it in a card game -- and then Morris Levy bought the rights from the winner for a hundred dollars. Levy changed the songwriting credit to feature a mob acquaintance of his, Johnny Roberts, and then passed the song to Gaetano Vastola, another mobster, who had it recorded by Gaye, a teenage girl he managed, with the backing provided by the normal New York R&B session players, like Big Al Sears and Panama Francis: [Excerpt: Barbie Gaye, "My Boy Lollipop"] That hadn't been a hit when it was released in 1956, but it had later been picked up by the Jamaican sound men, partly because of its resemblance to the ska style, and Blackwell had a tape recording of it. Blackwell got Ernest Ranglin, who had also worked on Dr. No, and who had moved over to the UK at the same time as Blackwell, to come up with an arrangement, and Ranglin hired a local band to perform the instrumental backing. That band, Jimmy Powell and the Five Dimensions, had previously been known as the Moontrekkers, and had worked with Joe Meek, recording "Night of the Vampire": [Excerpt: The Moontrekkers, "Night of the Vampire"] Ranglin replaced the saxophone solo from the original record with a harmonica solo, to fit the current fad for the harmonica in the British charts, and there is some dispute about who played it, but Millie always insisted that it was the Five Dimensions' harmonica player, Rod Stewart, though Stewart denies it: [Excerpt: Millie, "My Boy Lollipop"] "My Boy Lollipop" came out in early 1964 and became a massive hit, reaching number two on the charts both in the UK and the US, and Millie was now a star. She got her own UK TV special, as well as appearing on Around The Beatles, a special starring the Beatles and produced by Jack Good. She was romantically linked to Peter Asher of Peter and Gordon. Her next single, though, "Sweet William", only made number thirty, as the brief first wave of interest in ska among the white public subsided: [Excerpt: Millie, "Sweet William"] Over the next few years, there were many attempts made to get her back in the charts, but the last thing that came near was a remake of "Bloodshot Eyes", without the intimate partner violence references, which made number forty-eight on the UK charts at the end of 1965: [Excerpt: Millie, "Bloodshot Eyes"] She was also teamed with other artists in an attempt to replicate her success as a duet act. She recorded with Jimmy Cliff: [Excerpt: Millie and Jimmy Cliff, "Hey Boy, Hey Girl"] and Jackie Edwards: [Excerpt: Jackie and Millie, "Pledging My Love"] and she was also teamed with a rock group Blackwell had discovered, and who would soon become big stars themselves with versions of songs by Edwards, on a cover version of Ike and Tina Turner's "I'm Blue (the Gong Gong Song)": [Excerpt: The Spencer Davis Group, "I'm Blue (The Gong Gong Song)"] But the Spencer Davis Group didn't revive her fortunes, and she moved on to a succession of smaller labels, with her final recordings coming in the early 1970s, when she recorded the track "Enoch Power", in response to the racism stirred up by the right-wing politician Enoch Powell: [Excerpt: Millie Small, "Enoch Power"] Millie spent much of the next few decades in poverty. There was talk of a comeback in the early eighties, after the British ska revival group Bad Manners had a top ten hit with a gender-flipped remake of "My Boy Lollipop": [Excerpt: Bad Manners, "My Girl Lollipop"] But she never performed again after the early seventies, and other than one brief interview in 2016 she kept her life private. She was given multiple honours by the people of Jamaica, including being made a Commander in the Order of Distinction, but never really got any financial benefit from her enormous chart success, or from being the first Jamaican artist to make an impact on Britain and America. She died last year, aged seventy-two.

This weeks show is livicated to the music of the one and only Dennis Emmanuel Brown as we celebrate his earthstrong which is Feb 1st. Dennis Brown would have been 64 years young this year if he his life was not tragically cut short. You will hear Dennis Brown selections from all points of his career from his time with Derrick Harriot and Coxsone Dodd, to his time with Niney The Observer and Joe Gibbs, and also his works with Gussie Clarke and Sly and Robbie. It is truly a celebration of Dennis Brown music.  In the Dub Zone this week we present extended mixes featuring Dennis Brown with Niney The Observer, Ranking Buckers, I Roy, Gregory Isaacs and Cutty Ranks. Enjoy! Dennis Brown - Here I Come/Love & Hate Extended Mix - Satisfaction Deluxe - Tad’s Records  Dennis Brown - The Prophet Rides Again - The Complete A&M Years - A&M Records Dennis Brown - I Need Your Love (Rasta Children) - The Complete A&M Years - A&M Records Dennis Brown - The Spirit - Ready We Ready - Super Power Dennis Brown - To The Foundation - Judge Not - Shanachie Dennis Brown - Emmanuel Version/Emmanuel God Is With Us - The Promised Land - Blood & Fire Dennis Brown - Milk & Honey - Visions Of Dennis Brown - VP Records Dennis Brown - River Jordan/Heathen - Ready We Ready - Super Power Dennis Brown - Black Liberation - The Best of Dennis Brown: The Niney Years - Heartbeat Records Dennis Brown - Want To Be No General - The Promised Land - Blood & Fire  Dennis Brown - General Version - Umoja 20th Century Debwise - Blood & Fire  Dennis Brown - Praise Without Raise - Satisfaction Deluxe - Tad’s Records  Dennis Brown - A True - Words Of Wisdom - VP Records Dennis Brown - The Existence Of Jah - The Complete A&M Years - A&M Records Dennis Brown & Dillinger - Jah Is Watching/Hustling - Observer 12” Dennis Brown - Cosmic Force - Cosmic Force - Heartbeat Records - 1992 Dennis Brown - Words Of Wisdom - Words Of Wisdom - VP Records Dennis Brown - The World Is Troubled - The Complete A&M Years - A&M Records Dennis Brown - Let Me Be The One - Let Me Be The One - VP Records Dennis Brown - Love Light - Clive Hunt Presents: Bad, Bad, Bad - VP Records Dennis Brown & Prince Mohammed - Money In My Pocket/Cool Runnings - Old To The New: A Steely & Clevie Tribute To Joe Gibbs - VP Records Dennis Brown - Ain’t That Loving You - The Best Of The Joe Gibbs Years - Shanachie Dennis Brown - Silhouette - Love & Hate - VP Records Dennis Brown - Everybody’s Talking At Me - Bless Me Jah - Ras Records Dennis Brown - Little Green Apples - If I Follow My Heart - Studio One Dennis Brown - On The Dock Of The Bay - Money In My Pocket Anthology 1970-1995 - Trojan Records Dennis Brown - Black Magic Woman - Money In My Pocket Anthology 1970-1995 - Trojan Records Dennis Brown & Ranking Joe - Slave Driver/Slave Driver Version - Zion High - Blood & Fire Dennis Brown - Icy Road - Slow Down - Greensleeves Dennis Brown & Dre Island - Gun Town - King Jammy Presents: Dennis Brown: Tracks Of Life - Greensleeves Dennis Brown  - Africa We Want To Go - Slow Down - Greensleeves Dennis Brown feat. DYCR & Triston Palma - Back To Africa - King Jammy Presents: Dennis Brown: Tracks Of Life - Greensleeves Dennis Brown & Cutty Ranks - No More Will I Roam - King Jammys Dub Zone featuring Strictly Dubwize & Extended Dub Mixes Dennis Brown - Cassandra - The Prime Of Dennis Brown - Music Club Niney The Observer - Fire From The Observer - Dennis Brown In Dub - Heartbeat Records Dennis Brown - Tribulation - Ultimate Collection - Hip O Records Niney The Observer - Tribulation Version - Sledgehammer Dub: In The Streets Of Jamaica - Motion Records Dennis Brown - So Long Rastafari - Ultimate Collection - Hip O Records Niney The Observer - Dub Long Rastafari - Sledgehammer Dub: In The Streets Of Jamaica - Motion Records Dennis Brown - Give A Helping Hand - Open The Gate: Greatest Hits Vol. 2 - Heartbeat Records Niney The Observer - New Style - Sledgehammer Dub: In The Streets Of Jamaica - Motion Records Dennis Brown - West Bound Train - Ultimate Collection - Hip O Records Niney The Observer - Fire From The Observer Station - Dennis Brown In Dub - Heartbeat Records Ansel Collins & The Observer - Inbound Train - Niney & Friends: Blood & Fire - Trojan Records Dennis Brown & Ranking Buckers - Tenement Yard/Kill Landlord - Jah Love Rockers: Revolutionary Sounds From The Rockers & Steppers Era 1975-1980 - Trojan Records Dennis Brown & I Roy - Take A Trip / Fresh & Clean - Observer Gold 10”  Dennis Brown & Gregory Isaacs - Let Off Supm - Judge Not - Shanachie Records Dennis Brown - How Could I Leave You - Joe Gibbs 12” ================================= Dennis Brown - Should I - Love & Hate - VP Records Dennis Brown - If I Had The World - The Complete A&M Years - A&M Records Dennis Brown - Have You Ever - The Ultimate Collection - Hip O Records Dennis Brown - Love Has Found It’s Way - The Complete A&M Years - A&M Records Dennis Brown - Sitting & Watching - The Ultimate Collection - Hip O Records Dennis Brown - Your Loves Gotta Hold On Me - Love’s Gotta Hold On Me - Joe Gibbs Dennis Brown - Ghetto Girl - Reggae Anthology: Joe Gibbs Scorchers From The Mighty Two - VP Records Dennis Brown - Concrete Castle King - Visions Of Dennis Brown - VP Records Dennis Brown - Shashamane Living  - The Complete A&M Years - A&M Records Dennis Brown - Malcom X - Visions Of Dennis Brown - VP Records Dennis Brown - Promised Land (extended mix) - The Crown Prince Of Reggae: The Singles 1972-1985 - VP Records Dennis Brown - Wolves & Leopards - Love & Hate - VP Records Dennis Brown - Revolution - Love & Hate - VP Records Dennis Brown - If This World Were Mine - Satisfaction Feeling Deluxe Edition - Tad’s Records

Possessing a silky yet grainy, versatile voice, singer Delroy Melody has been playing his trade for 50 years. Born Lassive Jones, he began his career in late 60s trio The Schoolboys, with Lawrence Weir (brother of the Jamaicans’ Norris Weir) and one Jacob Miller (who would lead Inner Circle). Not to be confused with Prince Buster’s namesake child ensemble, The Schoolboys recorded the fast-reggae sides Guilty Of Love and Oh Tell Me for producer Bunny Lee. Guilty Of Love would be refashioned by Miller as Love Is A Message at Coxsone Dodd’s Studio 1 and Keep on Knocking for Augustus Pablo. In the 1970s, Delroy Melody went solo, cutting debut Tears for Bob Mac’s Abeng label. Six years later he voiced roots anthem Dread Must Be Fed for Dickie Wong’s Tit For Tat Records (written by his friend, drummer Sly Dunbar, in response to Haile Selassie’s passing). The song got a makeover for soundman Emperor Marcus, crowning his 1979 collector’s LP of the same name. Like his close comrade, Jamaicans member, Errol “I Kong”, Mr Melody experienced the vicissitudes of the Jamaican record business. The Dread Must Be Fed album was released abroad without Delroy seeing any royalties, while Marcus served jail-time for herb. The following year, Ease Up The Pressure - a remake of Dennis Brown’s Easy Take It Easy for Ruddy Williams - was repurposed in 1980’s infamous election and banned by the radio. Again like I Kong, Delroy retired to the St Elizabeth countryside during the slackness era, where he and his wife have been happily self-releasing via their Level Head Music label. Lately, he has branched out to European imprints: reissuing Ease Up The Pressure and Dread Must Be Fed on France’s Jamwax Records; and updating 1986 Harry J hit Buss Shot for Glasgow’s Scotch Bonnet Records’ Puffer’s Choice compilation. https://unitedreggae.com/articles/n2331/013018/interview-delroy-melody-part-1

24 Bigmikeydread Reggae Radio - The Gorgon - A Tribute to Bunny Lee Bunny Lee passed away on the 6th October this year of 2020. This show is offered in respect of I believe the greatest of all the Jamaican record producers. Not only did he virtually single handedly define the ‘Skinhead’ era of Early Reggae but he excelled in the era of the Golden age of Roots Reggae, a mission seemingly past the capabilities of Coxsone Dodd and Duke Reid, who only re-packed and re-dubbed their earlier output for a new era, fantastic though it was, while Lee produced fresh rhythms and entirely new music. Not only did he encourage the creativity of the greatest of house bands, but he employed the early creative talents of King Tubby, a genre defining artist (in the true meaning of the word) himself. He produced one of the first tunes to be called ‘Reggae’ Bangarang by Max Romeo and Lester Sterling.. he truly was ‘The Gorgon’ a Monster of Music. With thanks to Ken Jones aka Charlie Reggae for the Unity and Gas Singles. Charlie passed away many years ago, but was my original Reggae music mentor. 1. Ken Parker - How Could I - Trk 10 from Sir Lee’s Rocksteady Party At Buckingham Palace Cd - Jamaican Gold 2. Lloyd Clarke - Summertime - Trk 9, Sir Lee’s Rocksteady Party At Greenwich Farm Cd - Jamaican Gold 3. The Sensations - Long Time Me No See You Girl - Trk 17 Sir Lee’s Rocksteady Party at King’s House Cd - Jamaican Gold 4. Lester Sterling - Bangarang - Cd 2 Trk 3 of The Bunny Striker Lee Story 5. Errol Dunkley - I Take You in My Arms - FAB 7” Single 6. Pat Kelly - Striving For The Right - Gas 7” Single 7. Dave Barker - Wet Version - Attack 7” Single 8. Slim Smith - Zip-Pa-Di-Do-Da - Unity 7” Single 9. Pat Kelly as ‘Little Boy Blue’ - Dark End Of The Street - Lee’s 7” Single 10. Karl ‘King Cannonball’ Bryan - Fire Ball - 7” Unity Single 11. Jackie Mittoo & The Bunny Lee All Stars - Hook Up - 7” Unity Single 12. John Holt - Sometimes - Unity 7” Single 13. Slim Smith and The Uniques - My Conversation - Cd4 Track 19 of ‘The Bunny Lee Story’ 14. George Dekker - Foey Man - Carib-Disco (Pressure Sounds) 7” Single 15. Jeff Barnes and the Uniques - People’s Voice - Unity 7” Single 16. Delroy Wilson - Stay By Me - Jackpot 7” Single 17. U-Roy - Hat Trick - Trojan 7” Single 18. Jackie Brown - What Is Your Plan - Harry J (UK) 7” Single 19. Johnnie Clarke - Lemon Tree - Pyramid 7” Single 20. Johnnie Clarke - Joshua’s Word + Horns Dub - Jackpot 7” Single 21. Cornell Campbell - The Gorgon + Version - Angen 7” Single 22. Leroy Smart - I Don’t Like It - Attack Gold 10” Single 23. Dillinger - Jah Show Them The Way - Attack Gold 10” Single 24. Ken Boothe - Satta Massagana - Attack 7” Single 25. Lloyd Parks - Everybody Needs Love + Version - Horse 7” Single 26. Linval Thompson - No Escape - Gorgon 7” Single 27. Barry Brown - Cool Pon Yu Corner - Jackpot 7” Single 28. Ronnie Davis - The Power Of Love = King Tubby In A Fine Style - King Tubby The Dub Master Trojan 10” Single 29. Linval Thompson - Cool Down Your Temper / U-Roy - Cool Down - Jaguar 7” Single 30. Ronnie Davis - Kaya - Attack 7” Single That’s All Folks If you fancy helping the show out you can send money via PayPal. Don’t use Patreon it’s horrible. Send it via the link on the show page on Podomatic, this show is available on iTunes, Podomatic and Mixcloud. I thank you, this money is used to keep the servers pumping out the show, and occasionally to purchase a new tune to play you all. GOD BLESS BUNNY LEE

One of Jamaica's most beloved singers, Dobby Dobson, has died at the age of 78. Dobson passed away at 4:30 p.m on Tuesday at a hospital in Florida. Tommy Cowan of Glory Music reported that Dobson had COVID-19. “I was told a couple days ago that he was in a bad way. He had Alzheimer's for a while now and was in a home, then he was diagnosed with COVID." Highland 'Dobby' Dobson was nicknamed 'Loving Pauper' after one of his better-known songs. Dobson started singing in the early 1950s and recorded hit songs such as That Wonderful Sound and Mexican Divorce. He had stints with legendary producers Coxsone Dodd and Duke Reid, recording as a member of both The Virtues and The Sheiks. His signature song, Loving Pauper was done for Reid.

O cantor Owen Gray relembrou a amizade com Millie Small, vítima de um derrame na última semana. Owen treinou Millie a pedido de Coxsone Dodd, do Studio One, com quem gravou "Sugar Plum". Esse e outros assuntos no podcast desta semana com o DJ Waldiney.

Clinton Fearon joins Devin and Roger for a wide ranging discussion on the unique sound of Studio One, the first time he ever met Coxsone Dodd, recording tracks for The Ethiopians, his current The Boogie Brown Band in Seattle, WA, and sharing a laugh with his wife over dinner...Tunes of the week:The Willows - “Send Another Moses”Toots & The Maytals - “Alidina”SHOP PODCLASH MERCH! Every sale helps support the show. Thank you.https://rootfire-intl.myshopify.com/collections/the-reggae-podclash***Man-Like-Devin and Roger Rivas talk all things reggae with original and modern artists in the scene, live every other week at 6pm PT on http://thereggaepodclash.comDevin and Roger have a passion for sharing and discussing Jamaican 45 records. Each week they are joined by original and modern guests in the genre to talk all things Reggae.#ReggaePodclash #ClintonFearon #Rootfirehttp://www.Rootfire.nethttp://www.TheReggaePodClash.comFollow us on Instagram @thereggaepodclashSupport the show (https://rootfire.net/tv/)

After World War II, Jamaicans purchased radios in increasing numbers and were able to hear rhythm and blues music from Southern United States cities such as New Orleans by artists such as Fats Domino and Louis Jordan. Domino's rhythm, accentuating the offbeat as in the song "Be My Guest", was a particular influence. The stationing of American military forces during and after the war meant that Jamaicans could listen to military broadcasts of American music, and there was a constant influx of records from the United States. To meet the demand for that music, entrepreneurs such as Prince Buster, Coxsone Dodd, and Duke Reid formed sound systems.

In 1957 Morgan entered the Vere Johns Opportunity Hour, a talent show held at the Palace Theatre in #Kingston. He won with rousing impressions of Little Richard and, shortly after that, was recruited to perform around the island with the popular Jamaican comedy team Bim and Bam. In 1959 Morgan entered the recording studio for the first time. Duke Reid, the acclaimed sound system boss, was looking for talent to record for his Treasure Isle record label. Morgan cut two popular shuffle-boogie sides "Lover Boy", a.k.a. "S-Corner Rock", and "Oh My". Soon after, Morgan cut the bolero-tinged boogie "Fat Man", which also became a hit. He also found time to record for Coxsone Dodd. In 1960 Morgan became the only artist ever to fill the places from one to seven on the Jamaican pop chart simultaneously. Among those hits were "Don't Call Me Daddy", "In My Heart", "Be Still", and "Meekly Wait and Murmur Not". But it was the following year that Morgan released the biggest hit of his career, the Leslie Kong production of "Don't You Know", later retitled "Housewives' Choice" by a local #DJ. The song featured a bouncing #ska riddim, along with a duet by Morgan and Millicent "Patsy" Todd.

Mark Rainey went from running TKO records to running a vinyl pressing plant. But not just any plant but [at the time of this recording] "...the 1st large production automated record pressing plant in the Pacific Northwest." We talk about the impact of the changes in the music industry, plants that press bootleg vinyl and new options available and the story of their 7 inch press and it's connection to Coxsone Dodd. Peep the latest episode of Klyph Notes with Mark Rainey.

In #1957 #Morgan entered the Vere Johns Opportunity Hour, a talent show held at the Palace Theatre in #Kingston. He won with rousing impressions of Little Richard and, shortly after that, was recruited to perform around the island with the popular Jamaican comedy team Bim and Bam. In 1959 Morgan entered the recording studio for the first time. Duke Reid, the acclaimed sound system boss, was looking for talent to record for his Treasure Isle record label. Morgan cut two popular shuffle-boogie sides "Lover Boy", a.k.a. "S-Corner Rock", and "Oh My". Soon after, Morgan cut the bolero-tinged boogie "Fat Man", which also became a hit. He also found time to record for Coxsone Dodd. #nowplaying #trending,#jamaica #reggae #70s #80s #90s

  Welcome to episode twenty-four of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we're looking at "Ko Ko Mo" by Gene and Eunice. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. ----more---- Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. For the most part I have only used two resources for this podcast, because as I explain in the episode itself there is basically no information available anywhere on Gene and Eunice. The resource which I used for all the information about Gene and Eunice themselves, and most of the music, is the now out-of-print 2001 Ace Records CD Go On Ko Ko Mo!, whose eleven-page booklet by Stuart Colman contains about ten and a half pages more information about Gene and Eunice than otherwise seems to exist. For the information about John Dolphin, I used the self-published book Recorded in Hollywood, the John Dolphin Story, by Jamelle Baruck Dolphin. This contains some very incorrect information in parts -- notably, in the couple of paragraphs talking about Gene and Eunice, it mentions "The Vow" being covered by Bunny and Rita, which is how I found out about that, but it also says that the song was covered by Jackie and Doreen on the same label. The Jackie and Doreen record called "The Vow" is a different song (unless there were two records of that name, which I don't dismiss, but I've only been able to find one), and the book also calls Coxsone Dodd "Coxton Dodd". But presumably, given the author's surname and the fact that the book heavily quotes from John Dolphin's children, the book can be relied on to be more or less accurate when it comes to the facts of Dolphin's life, at least. The Ace Records CD mentioned above contains *almost* every record released by Gene and Eunice, but it doesn't contain the Aladdin Records version of "Ko Ko Mo", just the Combo original. However, That's Your Last Boogie, a three-CD compilation of Johnny Otis music I have recommended here before, does have that track on it, as well as many more tracks we've discussed in this series and a few that we're going to look at in future. And finally, it looks like the Kickstarter for the first book based on this series is going to fail -- there are two days left to go and it's still short by nearly two hundred pounds. But it's still possible to pledge if you feel like it. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript   "Arruba, Jamaica..." no, sorry, this is not that Kokomo, which much as I love the Beach Boys is *not* going to make this history. Instead it's a song that is now almost completely forgotten but which was one of the most important records in early rock and roll. And I do mean both that it has been almost completely forgotten and that it was hugely important. This song seems just to have fallen out of the collective memory altogether, to the extent that I only found out about it by reading old books and asking "what is this ko ko mo they're talking about?” Because it was important enough that *all* of the best books on R&B history -- most of which were written in the sixties or seventies, when the events I've been talking about were far fresher in the memory -- mentioned it, and said it was one of the most important records of 1954. And the fact is, there is an interesting story buried in there, the story of how "Ko Ko Mo" by Gene and Eunice was *two* of the most important records in early rock and roll. But there's another story there too -- the story of how a record can completely disappear from the cultural memory. Because even in those books which mention it... that's all they do. They just mention this record's existence, giving it no more than a few sentences. On most of these podcast episodes, I end up cutting a lot of material, because there's far more to say than will fit into a half-hour podcast. Here... there's nothing to cut. The sum total of all the information out there, in the whole world, as far as I can tell, is in a single eleven-page CD booklet. To talk about "Ko Ko Mo", first we're going to have to talk about Shirley & Lee. Shirley and Lee were "the sweethearts of the blues", a New Orleans R&B duo who recorded in Cosimo Matassa's studio. They weren't a real-life couple, but their publicity suggested that they were, and their songs made up a continuing story of an on-again off-again romance. Their first single, "I'm Gone", reached number two on the R&B charts: [excerpt: "I'm Gone", Shirley and Lee] They were, as far as I can tell, the first people in *any* genre to do this kind of couple back-and-forth singing, as opposed to duets by singers who clearly weren't in a real relationship. You can trace a line from them through Sonny and Cher or Johnny Cash and June Carter -- duet partners whose appeal was partly due to their offstage relationships. Of course in Shirley and Lee's case this was faked, but the audiences didn't know that, at least at the time. Shirley and Lee were popular enough that they inspired a whole host of imitators. We've mentioned Ike and Tina Turner before, and we're likely to talk about them again, but there was also Mickey and Sylvia, whose "Love is Strange" we'll be looking at later. The three duo acts we've mentioned all knew each other -- for example, Mickey and Sylvia sang backup on Ike and Tina Turner's "I Think It's Going to Work Out Fine". [excerpt: Ike and Tina Turner: "I Think It's Going To Work Out Fine"] But there was one other duo act who tried to make a success out of the Shirley and Lee formula, and who didn't know those other groups, and it's them we're going to be talking about today. Unlike Shirley and Lee, Gene and Eunice were a real-life couple, and so they didn't have to fake things the way Shirley and Lee did. Gene Forrest had been a jobbing singer for several years. He started out recording solo records for John Dolphin's label Recorded In Hollywood. The label "Recorded in Hollywood" was a bit of a misnomer, but that label name itself tells you something about the rampant racism of American society in the 1950s. You see, John Dolphin wasn't actually based in Hollywood because when he'd tried to open his first business there -- a record shop -- he'd been unable to, because Dolphin was black, and black people weren't allowed to own businesses in Hollywood. So he named his record shop "Dolphin's of Hollywood" anyway, and opened it in a different part of Los Angeles. But even though Dolphin was a victim of racism, he was also a beneficiary of it, and this just goes to show how revoltingly endemic racism was in the US in this time period. Because the original location for Dolphin's of Hollywood was on Central Ave, which at the time was the centre for black businesses in LA, in the same way that Beale Street was in Memphis or Rampart Street in New Orleans. But Central Ave only became a centre for black business because of one of the worst acts of racism in America's history. Most of the businesses there were originally owned by Japanese people. When, during World War II, Japanese people in America, and Japanese-Americans, were interred in concentration camps for the duration of the war, those businesses became vacant, and the white owners of the properties were desperate for someone to rent them to, so they "allowed" black people to rent them. There was a big campaign in the black local press at the time to encourage black entrepreneurs to take over these vacant properties, and part of the campaign was to tell people that if they didn't start businesses there then Jews would instead. Yes. Sadly society in the US at that time was just *that* fractally racist. But John Dolphin managed to build himself a very successful business, and he essentially dominated rhythm and blues in Los Angeles in the 1950s. As well as having a record shop, which stayed open twenty-four hours a day, he also owned a radio station, which broadcast from the front window of the record shop, with DJs such as Hunter Hancock and Johnny Otis. Those DJs would tell everyone they were broadcasting from Dolphin's, so the listeners would come along to the shop. And Dolphin innovated something that may have changed the whole of music history -- he deliberately targeted both his radio station and his record shop at white teenagers -- realising that they would buy music by black musicians if they knew about it, and that they had more money than the black community. As a result, his record shop often had queues out the door of white teenagers eager to buy the latest R&B records, and through the influence of his DJs the whole of the West Coast music scene became strongly influenced by the music people like Otis and Hancock would play. And then on top of that, in what, depending on how you look at it, was a great act of corporate synergy or something that should have brought action by antitrust agencies. Dolphin owned record labels. And his promise to artists was "We'll record you today and you'll have a hit tonight" -- because anything recorded on his labels would instantly go into heavy rotation on his radio station and be pushed in his record shop. Gene Forrest's records were an example: [excerpt: Gene Forrest, "Everybody's Got Money"] What that *didn't* mean for the musicians, though, was any money. Dolphin paid a flat fee for his recordings, took all the publishing rights, and wouldn't pay royalties. But for many musicians this was reasonable enough at the time -- the idea for them was that they'd make records for Dolphin to build themselves a name, then move on to a label which paid them reasonable amounts of money. As Dolphin never signed anyone to a multi-record contract, they could easily move on after making a record or two for him. Sadly for Gene the promise of "a hit tonight" didn't pay off, and after three singles for Recorded in Hollywood, he moved first to RPM Records, one of the many blues and R&B labels that was operating at the time, and then to Aladdin Records for a one-off single backed by a band called the Four Feathers. That would be the only record they would make together, but the connection with Aladdin Records would prove to be important. Shortly after that record came out, Forrest met a young singer named Eunice Levy, after she'd done well at Hunter Hancock's talent show. Initially they started working together because the Four Feathers were looking for a female harmony vocalist, but soon they became romantically involved, and started working as a duo rather than as part of a larger group, and recording for Combo Records. Combo was a tiny label owned by the trumpet player Jake Porter, and most of the records it released were recorded in Porter's basement. A typical example of a Combo release is "Ting Ting Boom Scat", by Jonesy's Combo: [excerpt: "Ting Ting Boom Scat", Jonesy's Combo] Gene and Eunice's only record for Combo, "Ko Ko Mo", is a fairly typical rhythm and blues record for 1954. It varies simply between a verse in tresillo rhythm, trying for something of the sound of Fats Domino's records, and a more straightforward shuffle on the choruses, going between them rather awkwardly: [excerpt: "Ko Ko Mo" first version, by Gene and Eunice] The reason for the awkward transition is simple enough -- it's a song made up from ideas from two different songwriters bolted together. Gene came up with the verse, while Eunice came up with the chorus -- she was inspired by the town of Kokomo, Indiana. Jake Porter is the third credited songwriter, and it's not entirely certain what, if anything, he contributed -- Porter was the owner of the record label, and label owners often took credit they didn't deserve. But on the other hand, Porter was himself a musician, and he'd performed with Lionel Hampton and Benny Goodman, among others, so it's not unreasonable that he might have actually contributed to the songwriting. The record was backed by "Jonesy's Combo", who are credited on the record along with Gene and Eunice. Now, listen to this: [excerpt "Ko Ko Mo", second version, by Gene and Eunice] That record is Gene and Eunice doing "Ko Ko Mo". The record is credited to Gene and Eunice with Johnny's Combo. The Johnny in this case is Johnny Otis, whose band backs the singers on that version. As you can tell, it sounds very close to identical to the original -- even though I'm sure Johnny Otis could easily have got the record sounding smoother and with more of a groove if he had been allowed. You see, Gene was still under contract with Aladdin Records as a solo artist following his one single with them, and when they found that he had put out a record that might have some success with a competing label, they decided that they had to have their own version, and pulled rank, getting him to rerecord the track as closely as he could to the original recording. Eunice wasn't contracted to Aladdin, but given that the alternative was presumably a lawsuit, she went along with it. Gene and Eunice were now an Aladdin Records act, and their next few records would all be released on that label. The recording replicated the original as closely as possible, and both records even had B-sides which were identical-sounding recordings of the same song. Once Combo Records found out, they started an advertising war with Aladdin. It was bad enough that other people were recording the song and having hits with it, but the same act putting out the record on two different labels, that was obviously unacceptable, and the two labels started to put out competing adverts in the trade journals, Aladdin's adverts saying "Don't Be Fooled, *THIS* is the Gene and Eunice Ko Ko Mo!", while Combo's said "This is it! The *original* Ko Ko Mo!" Billboard counted the two records as the same for chart purposes -- no-one could be bothered keeping track of *which* version of "Ko Ko Mo" it was that was played on the radio or on a jukebox. As far as the public were concerned, it was all one record, and that one record ended up going to number six on the R&B charts. But Gene and Eunice weren't the only ones to have a hit with "Ko Ko Mo". The song became the subject of almost a feeding frenzy of cover versions. The first, by Marvin and Johnny, came out only a month after the original recording: [Excerpt: "Ko Ko Mo" by Marvin and Johnny] But there were dozens upon dozens of them. The Crew Cuts, Louis Armstrong, The Flamingoes, Rosemary Clooney's sister Betty... everyone was recording a version of "Ko Ko Mo", within a month or two of the single coming out. The best explanation anyone can come up with for the massive, improbable, success of the song in cover versions is that it was one of the few R&B singles of the time to be completely free of sexual innuendo. While R&B records of the time mostly sound completely clean to modern ears, to radio programmers at the time records like "the Wallflower" and "Hound Dog" were utterly scandalous, and required substantial rewriting if they were going to play to white audiences. But "Ko Ko Mo" had such a simplistic lyric that there was no problem with it, and the result was that everyone could record it and have a hit with the white audience, leading to it even being recorded by Perry Como: [excerpt "Ko Ko Mo" by Perry Como] And that was the biggest hit of all. Como was the person with whom the song became associated, although thankfully for all concerned he made no further rock and roll records. And even Como's version is probably more rocking than that by Andy Griffith -- yes, that Andy Griffith, the 50s sitcom actor. [excerpt: Andy Griffith, "Ko Ko Mo"] It's notable that the trade magazines advertised Como's version of "Ko Ko Mo" as a rock and roll record -- this was in very early 1955, after "Rock Around the Clock" had been released, but well before it became a hit. But rock and roll was already a phrase that was in use for the style of music, at least among the trade magazines. Normally this kind of cover version would have brought at least a reasonable amount of money to the songwriters -- and as Gene and Eunice were the writers, that should have given them a large amount of money. However, after they sold the song to one publishing company, Aladdin claimed that they owned the publishing, again due to their existing contract with Gene Forrest. So everybody got a share of the money from the hit record, except for the people who wrote and sang it. Gene and Eunice's next single was "This is My Story" [Excerpt: Gene and Eunice "This is My Story"] There was a problem, though. "Ko Ko Mo" was going up the charts, and "This is My Story" was about to be released. They needed to go out on tour to capitalise on the first, promote the second, and generally get themselves into a position where they could have a career with some sort of possibility of lasting. And Eunice was pregnant, with Gene's child. Obviously, she couldn't go out on the road and tour, especially in the kind of conditions in which black artists had to tour in the 1950s, often sleeping on fans' floors because there were no hotels that would take black people. There was only one thing for it. They would have to get in a replacement Eunice. They auditioned several singers, before eventually settling on Linda Hayes, the sister of Tony Williams of the Platters. Hayes didn't sound much like Eunice, but she looked enough like her that she could do the job. We heard from Linda Hayes last week, when we looked at one of the Johnny Ace tribute records she sang on, but she had a relatively decent minor career herself, singing lead on several records with her brother's group before putting out a few records of her own. Here, for example, is one of her records with the Platters: [excerpt: Linda Hayes and the Platters, "Please Have Mercy"] So Gene toured with Linda as a substitute Eunice while Eunice was on what amounted to maternity leave, and that worked well enough. "This is My Story" went to number eight on the R&B charts, and it looked like Gene and Eunice were on their way to permanent stardom. Unfortunately, that wasn't the case, and by the time Eunice got back from maternity leave, the duo's career stalled. They recorded several more records for Aladdin, and tried various different tactics to repeat their early success, including having their records produced by the great Earl Palmer: [Excerpt: Gene and Eunice, "The Angels Gave You To Me"] None of that did any good as far as charting goes. "This is My Story" was their last chart hit for Aladdin records, and after the recordings with Earl Palmer in 1958, the label dropped them. They recorded for several more labels, with mixed results. For a while, Eunice returned to Combo records -- unsurprisingly, after what had happened with Gene's contract, Jake Porter didn't want to have anything to do with Gene, but Eunice released a couple of unsuccessful tracks with them: [excerpt: Eunice Levy, "Only Lovers"] So, why did Gene and Eunice become completely forgotten? Why, outside the liner notes for a single out-of-print CD booklet and a Wikipedia article based substantially on that booklet, have I been able to find a grand total of four paragraphs or so of text about them in any reliable source? And why does even that set of liner notes start with the sentence "Gene & Eunice's story is muddled, confusing, and largely unknown"? I think this comes back to something that has been an underlying theme of this podcast from the start -- the fact that great art comes from scenes as much as it does from individuals. This is not the same as saying that great *artists* aren't individuals, but that the music we remember tends to come out of reinforcing groups of artists, not just collaborating but providing networks for each other, acting as each other's support acts, promoting each other's material. I mentioned when I was talking about Mickey and Sylvia, Shirley & Lee, and Ike and Tina Turner that all three of these acts knew and worked with each other. None of them worked with Gene and Eunice, and Gene & Eunice just don't seem to have had any particular network of musicians with whom they collaborated. The collaboration with Johnny Otis just seems to have been a one-off job for him, and bringing in Linda Hayes doesn't seem to have led to any further connections with the people she worked with. With almost every act we've talked about, you find them turning up in unexpected places in biographies of other acts, and even the one-hit wonders who had hits that people remembered continued being parts of other musicians' lives. Gene and Eunice just didn't. But without those connections, without making themselves part of a bigger story, they didn't become part of the cultural memory. Most of the acts that covered "Ko Ko Mo" were people like Perry Como or Louis Armstrong who aren't part of the rock and roll canon, and so the record seems to have turned into a footnote. But that wasn't quite the end of their influence. Jamaica always had a soft spot for US R&B of the Fats Domino type, and Gene and Eunice, with their adaptations of Dave Bartholomew's New Orleans style, became mildly successful in Jamaica. In particular, their record "The Vow", which had been one of their last Aladdin releases, got covered on Coxsone Dodd's Studio One records, the label that basically pioneered ska, rocksteady, and reggae music in Jamaica. In 1965, Studio One released this: [excerpt: Bunny and Rita: "The Vow"] That's another version of their song, this time performed by Bunny and Rita -- as in Bunny Wailer, of the Wailers, and Rita Anderson, who would later also join the Wailers and become better known by her married name after she married Bunny's bandmate Bob Marley. Gene and Eunice attempted a reunion in the eighties. They didn't get on well enough to make it work, but Eunice did get to record one last single as a solo artist, under her new married name Eunice Russ Frost. On "Real Reel Switcher" she was backed by the classic fifties rhythm section of Red Callender and Earl Palmer: [excerpt: Eunice Russ Frost, "Real Reel Switcher"] Gene remained out of the spotlight until his death in 2003, but Eunice would occasionally perform at conventions for fans of doo-wop and R&B until she died in 2002. She never got to recapture her early success, but she did, at least, know there were still people out there who remembered "Ko Ko Mo”.

  Welcome to episode twenty-four of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we’re looking at “Ko Ko Mo” by Gene and Eunice. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. For the most part I have only used two resources for this podcast, because as I explain in the episode itself there is basically no information available anywhere on Gene and Eunice. The resource which I used for all the information about Gene and Eunice themselves, and most of the music, is the now out-of-print 2001 Ace Records CD Go On Ko Ko Mo!, whose eleven-page booklet by Stuart Colman contains about ten and a half pages more information about Gene and Eunice than otherwise seems to exist. For the information about John Dolphin, I used the self-published book Recorded in Hollywood, the John Dolphin Story, by Jamelle Baruck Dolphin. This contains some very incorrect information in parts — notably, in the couple of paragraphs talking about Gene and Eunice, it mentions “The Vow” being covered by Bunny and Rita, which is how I found out about that, but it also says that the song was covered by Jackie and Doreen on the same label. The Jackie and Doreen record called “The Vow” is a different song (unless there were two records of that name, which I don’t dismiss, but I’ve only been able to find one), and the book also calls Coxsone Dodd “Coxton Dodd”. But presumably, given the author’s surname and the fact that the book heavily quotes from John Dolphin’s children, the book can be relied on to be more or less accurate when it comes to the facts of Dolphin’s life, at least. The Ace Records CD mentioned above contains *almost* every record released by Gene and Eunice, but it doesn’t contain the Aladdin Records version of “Ko Ko Mo”, just the Combo original. However, That’s Your Last Boogie, a three-CD compilation of Johnny Otis music I have recommended here before, does have that track on it, as well as many more tracks we’ve discussed in this series and a few that we’re going to look at in future. And finally, it looks like the Kickstarter for the first book based on this series is going to fail — there are two days left to go and it’s still short by nearly two hundred pounds. But it’s still possible to pledge if you feel like it. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript   “Arruba, Jamaica…” no, sorry, this is not that Kokomo, which much as I love the Beach Boys is *not* going to make this history. Instead it’s a song that is now almost completely forgotten but which was one of the most important records in early rock and roll. And I do mean both that it has been almost completely forgotten and that it was hugely important. This song seems just to have fallen out of the collective memory altogether, to the extent that I only found out about it by reading old books and asking “what is this ko ko mo they’re talking about?” Because it was important enough that *all* of the best books on R&B history — most of which were written in the sixties or seventies, when the events I’ve been talking about were far fresher in the memory — mentioned it, and said it was one of the most important records of 1954. And the fact is, there is an interesting story buried in there, the story of how “Ko Ko Mo” by Gene and Eunice was *two* of the most important records in early rock and roll. But there’s another story there too — the story of how a record can completely disappear from the cultural memory. Because even in those books which mention it… that’s all they do. They just mention this record’s existence, giving it no more than a few sentences. On most of these podcast episodes, I end up cutting a lot of material, because there’s far more to say than will fit into a half-hour podcast. Here… there’s nothing to cut. The sum total of all the information out there, in the whole world, as far as I can tell, is in a single eleven-page CD booklet. To talk about “Ko Ko Mo”, first we’re going to have to talk about Shirley & Lee. Shirley and Lee were “the sweethearts of the blues”, a New Orleans R&B duo who recorded in Cosimo Matassa’s studio. They weren’t a real-life couple, but their publicity suggested that they were, and their songs made up a continuing story of an on-again off-again romance. Their first single, “I’m Gone”, reached number two on the R&B charts: [excerpt: “I’m Gone”, Shirley and Lee] They were, as far as I can tell, the first people in *any* genre to do this kind of couple back-and-forth singing, as opposed to duets by singers who clearly weren’t in a real relationship. You can trace a line from them through Sonny and Cher or Johnny Cash and June Carter — duet partners whose appeal was partly due to their offstage relationships. Of course in Shirley and Lee’s case this was faked, but the audiences didn’t know that, at least at the time. Shirley and Lee were popular enough that they inspired a whole host of imitators. We’ve mentioned Ike and Tina Turner before, and we’re likely to talk about them again, but there was also Mickey and Sylvia, whose “Love is Strange” we’ll be looking at later. The three duo acts we’ve mentioned all knew each other — for example, Mickey and Sylvia sang backup on Ike and Tina Turner’s “I Think It’s Going to Work Out Fine”. [excerpt: Ike and Tina Turner: “I Think It’s Going To Work Out Fine”] But there was one other duo act who tried to make a success out of the Shirley and Lee formula, and who didn’t know those other groups, and it’s them we’re going to be talking about today. Unlike Shirley and Lee, Gene and Eunice were a real-life couple, and so they didn’t have to fake things the way Shirley and Lee did. Gene Forrest had been a jobbing singer for several years. He started out recording solo records for John Dolphin’s label Recorded In Hollywood. The label “Recorded in Hollywood” was a bit of a misnomer, but that label name itself tells you something about the rampant racism of American society in the 1950s. You see, John Dolphin wasn’t actually based in Hollywood because when he’d tried to open his first business there — a record shop — he’d been unable to, because Dolphin was black, and black people weren’t allowed to own businesses in Hollywood. So he named his record shop “Dolphin’s of Hollywood” anyway, and opened it in a different part of Los Angeles. But even though Dolphin was a victim of racism, he was also a beneficiary of it, and this just goes to show how revoltingly endemic racism was in the US in this time period. Because the original location for Dolphin’s of Hollywood was on Central Ave, which at the time was the centre for black businesses in LA, in the same way that Beale Street was in Memphis or Rampart Street in New Orleans. But Central Ave only became a centre for black business because of one of the worst acts of racism in America’s history. Most of the businesses there were originally owned by Japanese people. When, during World War II, Japanese people in America, and Japanese-Americans, were interred in concentration camps for the duration of the war, those businesses became vacant, and the white owners of the properties were desperate for someone to rent them to, so they “allowed” black people to rent them. There was a big campaign in the black local press at the time to encourage black entrepreneurs to take over these vacant properties, and part of the campaign was to tell people that if they didn’t start businesses there then Jews would instead. Yes. Sadly society in the US at that time was just *that* fractally racist. But John Dolphin managed to build himself a very successful business, and he essentially dominated rhythm and blues in Los Angeles in the 1950s. As well as having a record shop, which stayed open twenty-four hours a day, he also owned a radio station, which broadcast from the front window of the record shop, with DJs such as Hunter Hancock and Johnny Otis. Those DJs would tell everyone they were broadcasting from Dolphin’s, so the listeners would come along to the shop. And Dolphin innovated something that may have changed the whole of music history — he deliberately targeted both his radio station and his record shop at white teenagers — realising that they would buy music by black musicians if they knew about it, and that they had more money than the black community. As a result, his record shop often had queues out the door of white teenagers eager to buy the latest R&B records, and through the influence of his DJs the whole of the West Coast music scene became strongly influenced by the music people like Otis and Hancock would play. And then on top of that, in what, depending on how you look at it, was a great act of corporate synergy or something that should have brought action by antitrust agencies. Dolphin owned record labels. And his promise to artists was “We’ll record you today and you’ll have a hit tonight” — because anything recorded on his labels would instantly go into heavy rotation on his radio station and be pushed in his record shop. Gene Forrest’s records were an example: [excerpt: Gene Forrest, “Everybody’s Got Money”] What that *didn’t* mean for the musicians, though, was any money. Dolphin paid a flat fee for his recordings, took all the publishing rights, and wouldn’t pay royalties. But for many musicians this was reasonable enough at the time — the idea for them was that they’d make records for Dolphin to build themselves a name, then move on to a label which paid them reasonable amounts of money. As Dolphin never signed anyone to a multi-record contract, they could easily move on after making a record or two for him. Sadly for Gene the promise of “a hit tonight” didn’t pay off, and after three singles for Recorded in Hollywood, he moved first to RPM Records, one of the many blues and R&B labels that was operating at the time, and then to Aladdin Records for a one-off single backed by a band called the Four Feathers. That would be the only record they would make together, but the connection with Aladdin Records would prove to be important. Shortly after that record came out, Forrest met a young singer named Eunice Levy, after she’d done well at Hunter Hancock’s talent show. Initially they started working together because the Four Feathers were looking for a female harmony vocalist, but soon they became romantically involved, and started working as a duo rather than as part of a larger group, and recording for Combo Records. Combo was a tiny label owned by the trumpet player Jake Porter, and most of the records it released were recorded in Porter’s basement. A typical example of a Combo release is “Ting Ting Boom Scat”, by Jonesy’s Combo: [excerpt: “Ting Ting Boom Scat”, Jonesy’s Combo] Gene and Eunice’s only record for Combo, “Ko Ko Mo”, is a fairly typical rhythm and blues record for 1954. It varies simply between a verse in tresillo rhythm, trying for something of the sound of Fats Domino’s records, and a more straightforward shuffle on the choruses, going between them rather awkwardly: [excerpt: “Ko Ko Mo” first version, by Gene and Eunice] The reason for the awkward transition is simple enough — it’s a song made up from ideas from two different songwriters bolted together. Gene came up with the verse, while Eunice came up with the chorus — she was inspired by the town of Kokomo, Indiana. Jake Porter is the third credited songwriter, and it’s not entirely certain what, if anything, he contributed — Porter was the owner of the record label, and label owners often took credit they didn’t deserve. But on the other hand, Porter was himself a musician, and he’d performed with Lionel Hampton and Benny Goodman, among others, so it’s not unreasonable that he might have actually contributed to the songwriting. The record was backed by “Jonesy’s Combo”, who are credited on the record along with Gene and Eunice. Now, listen to this: [excerpt “Ko Ko Mo”, second version, by Gene and Eunice] That record is Gene and Eunice doing “Ko Ko Mo”. The record is credited to Gene and Eunice with Johnny’s Combo. The Johnny in this case is Johnny Otis, whose band backs the singers on that version. As you can tell, it sounds very close to identical to the original — even though I’m sure Johnny Otis could easily have got the record sounding smoother and with more of a groove if he had been allowed. You see, Gene was still under contract with Aladdin Records as a solo artist following his one single with them, and when they found that he had put out a record that might have some success with a competing label, they decided that they had to have their own version, and pulled rank, getting him to rerecord the track as closely as he could to the original recording. Eunice wasn’t contracted to Aladdin, but given that the alternative was presumably a lawsuit, she went along with it. Gene and Eunice were now an Aladdin Records act, and their next few records would all be released on that label. The recording replicated the original as closely as possible, and both records even had B-sides which were identical-sounding recordings of the same song. Once Combo Records found out, they started an advertising war with Aladdin. It was bad enough that other people were recording the song and having hits with it, but the same act putting out the record on two different labels, that was obviously unacceptable, and the two labels started to put out competing adverts in the trade journals, Aladdin’s adverts saying “Don’t Be Fooled, *THIS* is the Gene and Eunice Ko Ko Mo!”, while Combo’s said “This is it! The *original* Ko Ko Mo!” Billboard counted the two records as the same for chart purposes — no-one could be bothered keeping track of *which* version of “Ko Ko Mo” it was that was played on the radio or on a jukebox. As far as the public were concerned, it was all one record, and that one record ended up going to number six on the R&B charts. But Gene and Eunice weren’t the only ones to have a hit with “Ko Ko Mo”. The song became the subject of almost a feeding frenzy of cover versions. The first, by Marvin and Johnny, came out only a month after the original recording: [Excerpt: “Ko Ko Mo” by Marvin and Johnny] But there were dozens upon dozens of them. The Crew Cuts, Louis Armstrong, The Flamingoes, Rosemary Clooney’s sister Betty… everyone was recording a version of “Ko Ko Mo”, within a month or two of the single coming out. The best explanation anyone can come up with for the massive, improbable, success of the song in cover versions is that it was one of the few R&B singles of the time to be completely free of sexual innuendo. While R&B records of the time mostly sound completely clean to modern ears, to radio programmers at the time records like “the Wallflower” and “Hound Dog” were utterly scandalous, and required substantial rewriting if they were going to play to white audiences. But “Ko Ko Mo” had such a simplistic lyric that there was no problem with it, and the result was that everyone could record it and have a hit with the white audience, leading to it even being recorded by Perry Como: [excerpt “Ko Ko Mo” by Perry Como] And that was the biggest hit of all. Como was the person with whom the song became associated, although thankfully for all concerned he made no further rock and roll records. And even Como’s version is probably more rocking than that by Andy Griffith — yes, that Andy Griffith, the 50s sitcom actor. [excerpt: Andy Griffith, “Ko Ko Mo”] It’s notable that the trade magazines advertised Como’s version of “Ko Ko Mo” as a rock and roll record — this was in very early 1955, after “Rock Around the Clock” had been released, but well before it became a hit. But rock and roll was already a phrase that was in use for the style of music, at least among the trade magazines. Normally this kind of cover version would have brought at least a reasonable amount of money to the songwriters — and as Gene and Eunice were the writers, that should have given them a large amount of money. However, after they sold the song to one publishing company, Aladdin claimed that they owned the publishing, again due to their existing contract with Gene Forrest. So everybody got a share of the money from the hit record, except for the people who wrote and sang it. Gene and Eunice’s next single was “This is My Story” [Excerpt: Gene and Eunice “This is My Story”] There was a problem, though. “Ko Ko Mo” was going up the charts, and “This is My Story” was about to be released. They needed to go out on tour to capitalise on the first, promote the second, and generally get themselves into a position where they could have a career with some sort of possibility of lasting. And Eunice was pregnant, with Gene’s child. Obviously, she couldn’t go out on the road and tour, especially in the kind of conditions in which black artists had to tour in the 1950s, often sleeping on fans’ floors because there were no hotels that would take black people. There was only one thing for it. They would have to get in a replacement Eunice. They auditioned several singers, before eventually settling on Linda Hayes, the sister of Tony Williams of the Platters. Hayes didn’t sound much like Eunice, but she looked enough like her that she could do the job. We heard from Linda Hayes last week, when we looked at one of the Johnny Ace tribute records she sang on, but she had a relatively decent minor career herself, singing lead on several records with her brother’s group before putting out a few records of her own. Here, for example, is one of her records with the Platters: [excerpt: Linda Hayes and the Platters, “Please Have Mercy”] So Gene toured with Linda as a substitute Eunice while Eunice was on what amounted to maternity leave, and that worked well enough. “This is My Story” went to number eight on the R&B charts, and it looked like Gene and Eunice were on their way to permanent stardom. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case, and by the time Eunice got back from maternity leave, the duo’s career stalled. They recorded several more records for Aladdin, and tried various different tactics to repeat their early success, including having their records produced by the great Earl Palmer: [Excerpt: Gene and Eunice, “The Angels Gave You To Me”] None of that did any good as far as charting goes. “This is My Story” was their last chart hit for Aladdin records, and after the recordings with Earl Palmer in 1958, the label dropped them. They recorded for several more labels, with mixed results. For a while, Eunice returned to Combo records — unsurprisingly, after what had happened with Gene’s contract, Jake Porter didn’t want to have anything to do with Gene, but Eunice released a couple of unsuccessful tracks with them: [excerpt: Eunice Levy, “Only Lovers”] So, why did Gene and Eunice become completely forgotten? Why, outside the liner notes for a single out-of-print CD booklet and a Wikipedia article based substantially on that booklet, have I been able to find a grand total of four paragraphs or so of text about them in any reliable source? And why does even that set of liner notes start with the sentence “Gene & Eunice’s story is muddled, confusing, and largely unknown”? I think this comes back to something that has been an underlying theme of this podcast from the start — the fact that great art comes from scenes as much as it does from individuals. This is not the same as saying that great *artists* aren’t individuals, but that the music we remember tends to come out of reinforcing groups of artists, not just collaborating but providing networks for each other, acting as each other’s support acts, promoting each other’s material. I mentioned when I was talking about Mickey and Sylvia, Shirley & Lee, and Ike and Tina Turner that all three of these acts knew and worked with each other. None of them worked with Gene and Eunice, and Gene & Eunice just don’t seem to have had any particular network of musicians with whom they collaborated. The collaboration with Johnny Otis just seems to have been a one-off job for him, and bringing in Linda Hayes doesn’t seem to have led to any further connections with the people she worked with. With almost every act we’ve talked about, you find them turning up in unexpected places in biographies of other acts, and even the one-hit wonders who had hits that people remembered continued being parts of other musicians’ lives. Gene and Eunice just didn’t. But without those connections, without making themselves part of a bigger story, they didn’t become part of the cultural memory. Most of the acts that covered “Ko Ko Mo” were people like Perry Como or Louis Armstrong who aren’t part of the rock and roll canon, and so the record seems to have turned into a footnote. But that wasn’t quite the end of their influence. Jamaica always had a soft spot for US R&B of the Fats Domino type, and Gene and Eunice, with their adaptations of Dave Bartholomew’s New Orleans style, became mildly successful in Jamaica. In particular, their record “The Vow”, which had been one of their last Aladdin releases, got covered on Coxsone Dodd’s Studio One records, the label that basically pioneered ska, rocksteady, and reggae music in Jamaica. In 1965, Studio One released this: [excerpt: Bunny and Rita: “The Vow”] That’s another version of their song, this time performed by Bunny and Rita — as in Bunny Wailer, of the Wailers, and Rita Anderson, who would later also join the Wailers and become better known by her married name after she married Bunny’s bandmate Bob Marley. Gene and Eunice attempted a reunion in the eighties. They didn’t get on well enough to make it work, but Eunice did get to record one last single as a solo artist, under her new married name Eunice Russ Frost. On “Real Reel Switcher” she was backed by the classic fifties rhythm section of Red Callender and Earl Palmer: [excerpt: Eunice Russ Frost, “Real Reel Switcher”] Gene remained out of the spotlight until his death in 2003, but Eunice would occasionally perform at conventions for fans of doo-wop and R&B until she died in 2002. She never got to recapture her early success, but she did, at least, know there were still people out there who remembered “Ko Ko Mo”.

From the very start, Coxsone Dodd allowed the more spiritual side of his musicians to speak in the studio on select tracks. As Rasta consciousness became more and more prevalent, Dodd managed to keep his finger on the pulse, releasing a wide variety of roots and conscious Tunes. This is part one of a two part mix examining some of my favorites. Track List: Skatalites – Exodus / Skatalites – Last Call / Skatalites – Addis Ababa / Gaylads – Africa / Bonny & Skitter – Lumumba / Hamlins – People Get Ready / Carlton & Shoes – Happy Land / The Melodians – Let’s Join Together / Denise Darlington – War No Right / Heptones – Equal Rights (12” discomix version) / Jah Jesco – Warning / Big Joe – Get Out Bald Head / King Stitt – Be A Man / Keith Wilson – God I Say / Bob Andy – Unchained / Alton Ellis – African Descendants / Abyssinians – Declaration Of Rights / The Heptones – Message From a Black Man / Sir Harry – Sound #1 / Lloyd Williams – Is It Because I’m Black / Zoot Simms – African Challenge / Im & Dave – Black Is Black / African Challenge Dub / Burning Spear – Rocking Time / Burning Spear – Door Peeper / Burning Spear – Joe Frazier / New Establishment – Joe Grazer / Rheuban Alexander – Happy Valley / Burning Spear – Foggy Road / Pablove Black – High Locks / Burning Spear – Swell Headed / Gladiators – Tribulation / Freddy McKay – Drunken Sailor / Horace Andy – See A Mans Face / Wildman Johnson – Face Version / Horace Andy – Something on My Mind / Peter Broggs – Sing a New Song Unto Jah / Bobby Kalphat – Addis Wa Wa / Cedric Brooks – Satta / Jah Scotchie – Man of Creation / Tony Tuff – Cool Down / Trevor Beltone – Life / Lennox Brown – Born to Be Winner / Larry Marshall – Run Babylon

In 1957 Morgan entered the Vere Johns Opportunity Hour, a talent show held at the Palace Theatre in Kingston. He won with rousing impressions of Little Richard and, shortly after that, was recruited to perform around the island with the popular Jamaican comedy team Bim and Bam. In 1959 Morgan entered the recording studio for the first time. Duke Reid, the acclaimed sound system boss, was looking for talent to record for his Treasure Isle record label. Morgan cut two popular shuffle-boogie sides "Lover Boy", a.k.a. "S-Corner Rock", and "Oh My". Soon after, Morgan cut the bolero-tinged boogie "Fat Man", which also became a hit. He also found time to record for Coxsone Dodd. In 1960 Morgan became the only artist ever to fill the places from one to seven on the Jamaican pop chart simultaneously. Among those hits were "Don't Call Me Daddy", "In My Heart", "Be Still", and "Meekly Wait and Murmur Not". But it was the following year that Morgan released the biggest hit of his career, the Leslie Kong production of "Don't You Know", later retitled "Housewives' Choice" by a local DJ. The song featured a bouncing ska riddim, along with a duet by Morgan and Millicent "Patsy" Todd. "Housewives' Choice" began the legendary rivalry between Morgan and Prince Buster, who accused Morgan of stealing his ideas. Buster quickly released "Blackhead Chiney Man", chiding Morgan with the sarcastic put-down, "I did not know your parents were from Hong Kong" – a swipe at Kong. Morgan returned with the classic "Blazing Fire", in which he warns Buster to "Live and let others live, and your days will be much longer. 

In 1957 Morgan entered the Vere Johns Opportunity Hour, a talent show held at the Palace Theatre in Kingston. He won with rousing impressions of Little Richard and, shortly after that, was recruited to perform around the island with the popular Jamaican comedy team Bim and Bam. In 1959 Morgan entered the recording studio for the first time. Duke Reid, the acclaimed sound system boss, was looking for talent to record for his Treasure Isle record label. Morgan cut two popular shuffle-boogie sides "Lover Boy", a.k.a. "S-Corner Rock", and "Oh My". Soon after, Morgan cut the bolero-tinged boogie "Fat Man", which also became a hit. He also found time to record for Coxsone Dodd. In 1960 Morgan became the only artist ever to fill the places from one to seven on the Jamaican pop chart simultaneously. Among those hits were "Don't Call Me Daddy", "In My Heart", "Be Still", and "Meekly Wait and Murmur Not". But it was the following year that Morgan released the biggest hit of his career, the Leslie Kong production of "Don't You Know", later retitled "Housewives' Choice" by a local DJ. The song featured a bouncing ska riddim, along with a duet by Morgan and Millicent "Patsy" Todd. "Housewives' Choice" began the legendary rivalry between Morgan and Prince Buster, who accused Morgan of stealing his ideas. Buster quickly released "Blackhead Chiney Man", chiding Morgan with the sarcastic put-down, "I did not know your parents were from Hong Kong" – a swipe at Kong. Morgan returned with the classic "Blazing Fire", in which he warns Buster to "Live and let others live, and your days will be much longer. 

Podcast della puntata andata in onda il 04/06/2016. Live cover : Don't Let Me Down

Podcast della puntata andta in onda il 05/06/2016. Live cover : Pretty Woman.

There are multiple theories about the origins of the word ska. Ernest Ranglin claimed that the term was coined by musicians to refer to the "skat! skat! skat!" scratching guitar strum. Ranglin asserted that the difference between R&B and ska beats is that the former goes "chink-ka" and the latter goes "ka-chink". Another explanation is that at a recording session in 1959 produced by Coxsone Dodd, double bassist Cluett Johnson instructed guitarist Ranglin to "play like ska, ska, ska", although Ranglin has denied this, stating "Clue couldn't tell me what to play!" A further theory is that it derives from Johnson's word skavoovie, with which he was known to greet his friends. Jackie Mittoo insisted that the musicians called the rhythm Staya Staya, and that it was Byron Lee who introduced the term "ska". Derrick Morgan said: "Guitar and piano making a ska sound, like 'ska, ska,"

There are multiple theories about the origins of the word ska. #ErnestRanglin claimed that the term was coined by musicians to refer to the "skat! skat! skat!" scratching guitar strum. Ranglin asserted that the difference between R&B and ska beats is that the former goes "chink-ka" and the latter goes "ka-chink". Another explanation is that at a recording session in 1959 produced by Coxsone Dodd, double bassist Cluett Johnson instructed guitarist Ranglin to "play like ska, ska, ska", although Ranglin has denied this, stating "Clue couldn't tell me what to play!" A further theory is that it derives from Johnson's word skavoovie, with which he was known to greet his friends. Jackie Mittoo insisted that the musicians called the rhythm Staya Staya, and that it was Byron Lee who introduced the term "ska". Derrick Morgan said: "Guitar and piano making a ska sound, like 'ska, ska,"

There are multiple theories about the origins of the word ska. Ernest Ranglin claimed that the term was coined by musicians to refer to the "skat! skat! skat!" scratching guitar strum. Ranglin asserted that the difference between R&B and ska beats is that the former goes "chink-ka" and the latter goes "ka-chink". Another explanation is that at a recording session in 1959 produced by Coxsone Dodd, double bassist Cluett Johnson instructed guitarist Ranglin to "play like ska, ska, ska", although Ranglin has denied this, stating "Clue couldn't tell me what to play!" A further theory is that it derives from Johnson's word skavoovie, with which he was known to greet his friends. Jackie Mittoo insisted that the musicians called the rhythm Staya Staya, and that it was Byron Lee who introduced the term "ska". Derrick Morgan said: "Guitar and piano making a ska sound, like 'ska, ska,"

2100HRS (UK) A Soup Sessions first with Nick Bowman… Ska Nick will be taking us on a very magical musical journey with a soundscape of delightful rareness and soul! NOT TO BE MISSED!! Tune in Live from 9pm (UK) x “Some say the Motown of Jamaica, Coxsone Dodd’s music was at the forefront of the JA recording industry for 30 years, this Thursday brings Ska Nick to the Radio Nova Lujon camp where he will be sharing his extensive collection for 4 hours of Sir Coxsone Dodd’s music all from original 7″ through the decades from 1959 to the 80s.” CONTACT THE SHOW DIRECT (E-MAIL) “https://radio.novalujon.com/07-05-15-soup-sessions-with-nick-bowman/” From 07.05.15 Soup Session with Nick Bowman. Posted by David Jazzy Dawson on 5/08/2015 (5 items) Generated by Facebook Photo Fetcher 2 The post 07.05.15 Soup Sessions with Nick Bowman appeared first on Radio Nova Lujon.

2100hrs (UK) A Soup Sessions first with Nick Bowman… Ska Nick will be taking us on a very magical musical journey with a soundscape of delightful rareness and soul! NOT TO BE MISSED!! Tune in Live from 9pm (UK) x “Some say the Motown of Jamaica, Coxsone Dodd’s music was at the forefront of the JA recording industry for 30 years, this Thursday brings Ska Nick to the Radio Nova Lujon camp where he will be sharing his extensive collection for 4 hours of Sir Coxsone Dodd’s music all from original 7″ through the decades from 1959 to the 80s.” “http://radio.novalujon.com/07-05-15-soup-sessions-with-nick-bowman/” From 07.05.15 Soup Session with Nick Bowman, posted by David Jazzy Dawson on 5/08/2015 (5 items) Generated by Facebook Photo Fetcher 2

2100hrs (UK) A Soup Sessions first with Nick Bowman… Ska Nick will be taking us on a very magical musical journey with a soundscape of delightful rareness and soul! NOT TO BE MISSED!! Tune in Live from 9pm (UK) x “Some say the Motown of Jamaica, Coxsone Dodd’s music was at the forefront of the JA recording industry for 30 years, this Thursday brings Ska Nick to the Radio Nova Lujon camp where he will be sharing his extensive collection for 4 hours of Sir Coxsone Dodd’s music all from original 7″ through the decades from 1959 to the 80s.” “http://radio.novalujon.com/07-05-15-soup-sessions-with-nick-bowman/” From 07.05.15 Soup Session with Nick Bowman, posted by David Jazzy Dawson on 5/08/2015 (5 items) Generated by Facebook Photo Fetcher 2

Desmond Adolphus Dacres was born in Saint Andrew ParLive:Trubite to  Life and works of Ledgendary Reggae Music Icon Desmond Dekker (Greater Kingston), Jamaica, on 16 July 1941. Dekker spent his early formative years in Kingston, the capital of Jamaica. From a very young age Dekker would regularly attend the local church with his grandmother and aunt. This early religious upbringing as well as his enjoyment of singing hymns led to a lifelong religious commitment. Following his mother's death as a result of illness, Dekker moved to the parish of St. Mary and then later to St. Thomas. While at St. Thomas Dekker embarked on an apprenticeship as a tailor before returning to Kingston where he secured employment as a welder. His workplace singing had drawn the attention of his co-workers who encouraged him to pursue a career in the music industry. In 1961 he auditioned for Coxsone Dodd (Studio One) and Duke Reid (Treasure Isle) though neither audition was successful. The young unsigned vocalist then successfully auditioned for Leslie Kong's Beverley's record label and was awarded his first recording contract www.crsradio.com

Music historians typically divide the history of ska into three periods: the original Jamaican scene of the 1960s; the English2 Tone ska revival of the late 1970s, which fused Jamaican ska rhythms and melodies with the faster tempos and harder edge of punk rock; and the third wave of ska, which involved bands from the UK, other European countries (notably Germany), Australia, Japan, South America and the US, beginning in the 1980s and peaking in the 1990s

Vivienne Tanya Stephenson Tanya Stephens, (born 2 July 1973, Kingston, Jamaica, as Vivienne Tanya Stephenson (although some sources say Vivienne Tanya Stephens)) is an influential reggae artist who emerged in the late 1990s. Stephens is most known for her hits "Yuh Nuh Ready Fi Dis Yet" — the single was later featured on the Reggae Gold 1997 compilation album — and "It's a Pity", which achieved Tanya international recognition. She and life partner Andrew Henton have together co-founded Tarantula Records.

Born and raised in Spanish Town in Kingston, Jamaica Lutan's initial influence of African consciousness was instilled by his grandfather Tamba, and his spiritual identity is rooted in Rastafar-I, Bobo Ashanti. Musically speaking, Lutan was heavily influenced by all four of his grandparents. One of his grandmothers, Ms. Esmay, was the very first to teach him actual range levels in singing, however both grandmothers were known to be powerful singers. One of Lutan's grandfathers (Tamba) owned and played one of the very first Rumba Box instruments which still remains in the family today and he also played the harmonica, of which he eventually gifted to Lutan when he was a young boy. When Lutan was a teenager, both of his grandfathers hosted weekly parties on their lawns--affectionatelly coined the Tamba Harmony Hall and the Ackee Wackee Hall--at which friends like Coxsone Dodd who lived nearby, Joe Gibbs, Bob Marley, Dennis Brown, Alton Ellis, Hortense Ellis, Stereograph, Jah Love, Wasp, Volcano and many other reggae legends would be present, enjoying music and/or playing dominoes. His grandfather Tamba also owned a sound system, the then popular Black I-niverse of which Coxsone Dodd used to share music with and in those times you might have seen Lutan playing the sound and blowing a few amps as well.  Musician and Author Tena Williams A.K.A. “Lady Flava” began singing in her church choir as a little girl in Jamaica and continued when she migrated to the United States at the age of 10. She began writing songs at the age of 16. Reggae, R&B, and Rap. Tena began recording professionally in late 2006. Tena Williams is also the CEO of the Finding Peace Campaign Corporation a non-profit organization designed to benefit victims of abuse and others in need of food, clothing, shelter, training, counseling and more. www.crsradio.com www.caribbeanradioshow.com  661-467-2407

The Celebrity Link: #1 songs  by Jamaicans  reaching UK Singles National Chart The incidence of Jamaican recordings reaching the United Kingdom charts and impacting British culture has become commonplace. Millie Small's 1964 remake of Barbie Gaye's 1957 R&B hit, My Boy Lollipop set the trend when it climbed to No. 2 on the British charts. It effectively opened the floodgates for a deluge of Jamaican recordings to flow incessantly onto the British charts. Earlier, others like Laurel Aitken and Dandy Livingstone created an initial impact, with Aitken's Boogie in My Bones and Little Sheila in 1957 becoming the first Jamaican-made recordings to be distributed in England. A couple years after Millie Small's hit, ska legend Prince Buster burst onto the UK music scene with the ultimate rude-boy song, Al capone Guns Don't Argue, which established his career in Britain. The year 1967 saw the biggest Jamaica-UK hit of that period, when Desmond Dekker's 007 (Shanty Town) found its way to the No. 14 slot on the charts. Dekker, who had ushered in a more conscious form of Jamaican rocksteady, revealed to the outside world, through the recording, the condition of ghetto dwellers and gun-toting hoodlums in a society going through a transition: Two years later, Dekker and the Aces would return to register Jamaica's greatest impact on the UK charts and the first Jamaican record to hit the No. 1 spot there — Israelites. Although few could understand its lyrics, it became a timeless masterpiece, merely on the strength of its intense reggae beat, reaching the top in April 1969.http://www.herald.co.zw/jamaican-music-rules-uk/ 661-467-2407 www.crsradio.com

Mighty Diamonds are a Jamaican harmony trio, recording roots reggae with a strong Rastafarian influence. was formed in 1969 and remains together as of 2012. They are best known for their 1976 debut album Right Time produced by Joseph Hoo Kim and the 1979 release Deeper Roots.Formed in 1969 in the Trenchtown area of Kingston, the group comprises lead vocalist Donald "Tabby" Shaw, and harmony vocalists Fitzroy "Bunny" Simpson and Lloyd "Judge" Ferguson.[1][2] They had become friends at school in the mid-1960s, and were originally called The Limelight, adopting 'The Mighty Diamonds' after Shaw's mother started referring to them as "the diamonds".[3][4] Their smooth harmonies and choreographed stage show were inspired by Motown vocal groups of the 1960s, with Shaw listing The Temptations, The Stylistics, The Impressions, and The Delfonics as influences as well as Jamaican rocksteady artists such as John Holt and Ken Boothe.[2][3][4] Their early recordings were produced by Pat Francis, Stranger Cole ("Girl You Are Too Young" (1970), "Oh No Baby"), Derrick Harriott ("Mash Up"), Bunny Lee ("Jah Jah Bless the Dreadlocks", "Carefree Girl"), Lee "Scratch" Perry ("Talk About It"), and Rupie Edwards, but it was in 1973 that they had their first hit single with the Francis-produced "Shame and Pride", recorded at the Dynamic Sounds studio.[2][4][5] It was their mid-1970s work with producer Joseph Hoo Kim that gave them their real breakthrough.[1] "Country Living" and "Hey Girl", were recorded and released by the Channel One label. "Right Time" followed, on Hoo Kim's Well Charge label, and cemented their status as one of the top Jamaican groups of the time www.crsradio.com 661-467-2407 caribbeanradioshow@gmail.com

   Trevor McNaughton had the idea of putting a group together and contacted the then fourteen year old Lloyd Brevett, who had already had success in local talent shows.[1] Brevett recruited his friend Brent Dowe and the group was formed, with Brevett taking on lead vocal duties.[1] Bramwell Brown and Ranford Cogle also had short stints in the group in its early days, and Cogle became one of the group's main songwriters.[1] The group recorded some material with Prince Buster before Ken Boothe introduced them to Coxsone Dodd's Studio One label where in 1966 they recorded "Lay It On" (one of the first records to reflect the shift from ska to rocksteady), "Meet Me", "I Should Have Made It Up" and "Let's Join Hands (Together)".[1] Lead vocal duties were now shared between Brevett and Dowe.[1] From 1967 to 1968 they had a number of hits on Duke Reid's Treasure Isle label, including "You Have Caught Me", "Expo 67", "I'll Get Along Without You", and "You Don't Need Me".[1] After recording "Swing and Dine" for record producer Sonia Pottinger, they had further hits with "Little Nut Tree" before recording their biggest hit, "Rivers of Babylon" for Leslie Kong.[1] This song became an anthem of the Rastafarian movement, and was featured on the soundtrack for the movie, The Harder They Come.[2] In the early 1970s Brevett also recorded as a solo artist, having his greatest success with "Don't Get Weary".[1] After Kong's death in 1971, they recorded for Lee Perry and Byron Lee's Dynamic Studios. In 1973, Brent Dowe left the group for a solo career. The group reformed briefly a few years later, and again in the early 1980s.

REGGAE MUSIC Celebrity Link-Celebrating  The Reggae Icons THE HEPTONES The Heptones are a Jamaican rocksteady and reggae vocal trio most active in the 1960s and early 1970s. They were one of the more significant trios of that era, and played a major role in the gradual transition between ska and rocksteady with their three-part harmonies. Leroy Sibbles, Earl Morgan and Barry Llewellyn first came together as "The Hep Ones" in 1965 in Kingston but they soon changed their name to "The Heptones". The name was chosen by Morgan after seeing a Heptones Tonic bottle lying in a pile of refuse. The Heptones recorded for major Jamaican record producers at the time. They began their career, after one unsuccessful single. for Ken Lack's "K Calnek" label, under the watchful eye of Coxsone Dodd of Studio One. The Heptones had a number of Jamaican hits for Studio One, beginning with "Fattie Fattie", their first Studio One single in 1966. This began a long run of success for Coxsone, including "Pretty Looks Isn't All", "Get In The Groove", "Be a Man", "Sea of Love" (a cover of the Phil Phillips and the Twilights doo-wop classic), "Ting a Ling", "Party Time" and "I Hold the Handle." They were the chief rivals to The Techniques, who recorded for Arthur "Duke" Reid, as the top vocal act of the rocksteady era.#reggae #reggaebillboardchart #nowplaying www.crsradio.com  www.caribbeanradioshow@gmail.com 661-467-2407  

Dawn Penn's earliest recordings were composed and written by Dawn Penn around 1966 using session musicians. In 1967 she recorded the rocksteady single, "You Don't Love Me" produced by Coxsone Dodd at Studio One.[1] She also recorded "Why Did You Leave" at Studio One, "Broke My Heart" for Bunny Lee, "I Let You Go Boy" and covers of "To Sir with Love" and "Here Comes the Sun".By 1970 Penn had left the music industry and had moved to the Virgin Islands.In 1987, however, she returned to Jamaica and to music. In the summer of 1992 she was invited to appear on stage at a Studio One anniversary show, where she performed the song "You Don't Love Me" with Steely & Clevie as backing musicians. The performance was a success, and she returned to the recording studio to re-record the song for the tribute album Steely & Clevie Play Studio One Vintage. It was released as the single "You Don't Love Me (No, No, No)" over a year later, reaching the charts in the U.S. and Europe, plus hitting #1 in her native Jamaica, and making #3 in the UK Singles Chart. Penn's next album, No, No, No, was released on Big Beat Records in 1994. Subsequently, "You Don't Love Me (No, No, No)" has been sampled and covered by the artists Kano, Hexstatic, Jae Millz, Ghostface Killah, Mims, Eve featuring Stephen Marley and Damian Jr. Gong Marley. Their versions were all renamed as "No, No, No", bar Ghostface's, which was named "New Splash". The song was performed by Blue King Brown on the Australian youth radio network Triple J programme "Like a Version" 2006. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dawn_Penn

Bob Andy (born Keith Anderson) emerged as a solo star in 1966 with the smash hit "I've Got to Go Back Home", a song which has become a much-loved anthem for Jamaicans. He had served his singing and songwriting apprenticeship with the legendary vocal group The Paragons, which he founded with Tyrone (Don) Evans and Howard Barrett, later joined by John Holt. The Paragons had several hits for producer Coxsone Dodd including the Number One "Love At Last", penned by Bob. As one of Studio One's leading lights, Bob worked closely with Jackie Mittoo on many of the label's seminal sounds. Besides writing songs for himself which have become reggae standards - "Feeling Soul", "My Time", "Going Home", and "Too Experienced", to name just a few - Bob contributed hits for many of the other artists there In 1970, international recognition came when Bob and Marcia Griffiths recorded Nina Simone's "Young, Gifted and Black", which sold 1/2 million in the UK and Europe, and still receives frequent airplay today. BOB & MARCIA became household names, appearing on Top of the Pops and touring extensively. They had another UK Top Ten single and two albums for Trojan Records."You Don't Know" and "Life" are two songs from this time which hold a special place in the hearts of his British fans. After the duo split in 1974, Marcia became one of Bob Marley's I-Threes, and Bob's singles "Fire Burning" and "Check It Out" struck a responsive chord with Jamaicans in the new social consciousness of the Manley era. more on  http://www.bobandy.com/ caribbeanradioshow@gmail.com call in 661-467-2407 (c) copyright  Warning - any person and/or institution and/or Agent and/or Agency of any  structure including but not limited to the United States. you do NOT have my permission to utilize any of the content contained herein

Prince Jazzbo is a Jamaican DJ and was very successful as a Producer in Reggae music with his Ujama record label. Jazzbo started as a DJ on Killa Whip sound in the Homestead area of Spanish Town. At A dance between Killa Whip and Ruddy's Sound in 1971, Jazzbo "clashed" with the great I-Roy. This clash was the start of some of the first musical "beef" between artists - well before Beenie and Capleton and Tupac and Biggie. More importantly, it was a patron by the name of Coxsone Dodd who was at that dance, that invited Jazzbo to Studio One to record the very next morning. Jazzbo was there at 5:00am waiting for Coxsone. Prince Jazzbo is from the original school of toasters in Jamaica - alongside U-Roy, I-Roy, Big Youth, Lizzy, Dennis Alcapone, and others. The style of Dj'ing has a unique sound and style in that era. At the time of this interview Jazzbo was actively producing the artists Horace Ferguson, Horace Andy, Buzz Parker, Little Jazzbo (his son), and Black Thunder out of Belgium. Visit the source: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Prince-Jazzbo/540441745982050 Now, if you like what you hear, we encourage you to seek out and purchase great Prince Jazzbo music. Buy his albums in the shops, on I-Tunes, and via Ernie B reggae.

Paris DJs Soundsystem presents The Silvertones 1965-1979 (MP3 Podcast on www.ParisDJs.com) 2013-01-24 Paris DJs is celebrating the imminent release of The Silvertones' new album 'Keep On Rolling', with a 27mn mix of their hits and past recordings, from the Ska years in the 60s (with Duke Reid at Treasure Isle), to the Roots Reggae tunes from the 70s (with Lee Perry at Black Art, or Coxsone Dodd at Studio One). After albums for rubadub deejay The Lone Ranger, or sweet and soulful reggae singer Carlton Livingston, French multi-instrumentalist/sound engineer Grant Phabao keeps on bringing back legends of Jamaican music into the spotlight, so stay connected for this upcoming 15th release on the Paris DJs label! Meanwhile, enjoy this half hour history class of classic Jamaican vibes, extracted from old vinyl 45s, mixed and mastered for your optimized audio pleasure. PS Note that the podcast of mixes has ended with mix #400, but we're still publishing some new stuff on the "virtual releases" podcast, including free singles, remixes or sometimes even some mixes such as this one. Subscribe here. Tracklisting : 01. The Silvertones with Lynn Tait and The Boys - It's Real (from 'Storm Warning' 7 inch, 1966 / Treasure Isle/Doctor Bird) produced by Duke Reid 02. The Silvertones - Rejoice Jah Jah Children (from 'Rejoice Jah Jah Children' 7 inch, 1976 / Black Ark) produced by Lee Perry 03. Duke Reid and The Silvertones - True Confession (from 'True Confession' 7 inch, 1965 / Treasure Isle) produced by Duke Reid 04. Muskyteers - Kiddyo (from 'Kiddy-O' 7 inch, 1969 / Upsetter) produced by Lee Perry 05. The Silvertones - What a Situation (from 'What A Situation' 7 inch, 1977 / Trojan) produced by Jerry Maytals 06. Muskyteers - Endlessly (from 'Kiddy-O' 7 inch, 1969 / Upsetter) produced by Lee Perry 07. The Silvertones with Tommy McCook - In The Midnight Hour (from 'In The Midnight Hour' 7 inch, 1968 / Treasure Isle) produced by Duke Reid 08. The Silvertones - Smile (from 'Smile' 7 inch, 1979 / Studio One) produced by Coxsone S. Dodd 09. The Silvertones - Financial Crisis (from 'Financial Crisis' 7 inch, 1974 / Orchid) produced by Lee Perry 10. The Silvertones - He Don't Love You (from 'He Don't Love You' 7 inch, 1968 / Upset) produced by Lee Perry Total time : 27mn 05s All the original cover artworks are available on the Paris DJs blog Credits : Selection by Djouls from the Paris DJs Soundsystem (parisdjs.com) Mix and audio mastering by Grant Phabao (grantphabao.com) Artwork inspired from The Silvertones' album 'Silver Bullet' (Trojan, 1973) Links : The Silvertones : discogs | facebook | juno | myspace | wikipedia Paris DJs : parisdjs.com | bandcamp | facebook | juno | pinterest | soundcloud | twitter | youtube

 Fred Locks began his career in the 1960s as part of a vocal harmony group, in his case a group he formed in secondary school, The Flames, and in 1966 The Lyrics, who recorded for Coxsone Dodd in the late 1960s, with tracks such as "A Get It", "Girls Like Dirt", and "Hear What The Old Man Say". They later moved on to Vincent Chin's Randy's setup, recording "Give Thanks", "East to the Right", and a cover of Simon & Garfunkel's "Bridge Over Troubled Water", also working with Lee "Scratch" Perry, and released the self-financed "Sing A Long" in 1971 on their own Lyric label. "Songbird" Gordon holds nothing back in her newly released single, “I Just Want to Love You”. Cradled by a lover's rock reggae riddim, with a true R&B sultry soulful feel, Michelle's passionate voice carries listeners deep into the heart of the music.Michelle Gordon began singing from the young age of four in Kingston, Jamaica, to congo drums and the tambourine. School choir gave Michelle more opportunities for vocal training, music lessons, and performing. She participated in singing competitions and talent shows, and won several awards.  Fitzroy Francis,was born in Kingston,Jamaica and grow up in the community of Waterhouse.I got involve in the business of music from 1985.I produced my first single "Things A Gwan,Things A Go Down" by Andrew Bees in 1991 and his  first album "Militant" in 1995. In 2011I conceptualize the Mightyful13 Records label in Queens ,New York.It advent commence with the "Mighty In Battle" riddim project, "RECONFIGURATION" the missing link of "REGGAE" Works at Mightyful13 Records LLC caribbeanradioshow@gmail.com 661-467-2407

Listen online Radio caribbean radio show  Salute  to Jamaica Crown Prince of Reggae Music Dennis Emanuel Brown.               Dennis Emmanuel Brown -           February 1, 1957-July 1, 1999         "The Crowned Prince of Reggae" The “King Of Reggae” Robert Nesta Marley anointed him the "Crowned Prince of Reggae", Dennis is one of Jamaica's top vocalists of all time.  The young teen recorded his first two albums with Coxsone Dodd's Studio One Records albums.  Brown catapult on the music scene as a legitimate Reggae Artist after he recorded an album for Joe Gibbs.  The public demand and the popularity for Dennis ignited  and recording frenzy ensued .Interest from several producers, came flooding in including Gussie Clark, Flabba Holt, and Sly and Robbie, among others.  Brown soon began to capitalize on his popularity and released as many as half a dozen albums in one year. Producers were lining up eager to work with him. Dennis Emmanuel Brown untimely death came  at age 42 on July 1st July 1999. He will definitely go down in the reggae record books as one of Jamaica's best vocalist of all time, and deservingly so.  Listen to live web radio  online www.caribbeanradioshow.com

This version of jamaica Way Reggae Podcast is spoken word only. It features discussions about the great Coxsone Dodd and Studio One. We are pleased to offer interviews for you to listen to from Monty Alexander, Don One, Dennis Brown, Ken Boothe, Coxsone Dodd, Freddie McGregor, Tony Screw, Keith Lyn (of Byron Lee & The Dragonaires), Sister Ignatius of Alpha School, and the great engineer Graeme Goodall (Mr. Goody"). This collection of interviews were all completed by Rich Lowe of WRUW Radio and The Reggae Directory Magazine. Years ago we published a issue of The Reggae Directory that consisted completely about Coxsone Dodd. Interviews are strung together and are on the topics of Studio One. We hope that you enjoy this slightly different version of The Jamaica Way Reggae Podcast. There is a lot of great information here. Subjects include: Jamaica Brentford Road, Kingston, reggae, ska, rocksteady, mento, Musik City, Downbeat sound, piano styling, Federal Studios, The Clarendonians, Alpha School, The Skatalites, Don Drummond, and much more, Enjoy - more to come.... Rich Lowe

This is another listener suggested mix specially prepared for the reggae lover podcast. The 'A Love I Can Feel' rhythm was first released on a vocal by John Holt under the same name in 1970. It was produced by Coxsone Dodd at Studio One and was a sizeable hit. John Holt re-recorded his original vocal a number of times (about once per decade) including for Henry ‘Junjo' Lawes' Volcano label, King Jammy, and the Parish label. The rhythm has been used around 100 times, most frequently by King Jammy and Donovon Germain of Penthouse Records. Please download using the link below, and feel free to spread the word to fellow reggae lovers. Also email reggaeloverpodcast@gmail.com to make suggestions, requests or comments, and to get additional information. Playlist: 1 John Holt - A Love I Can Feel - Studio One 2 Dennis Alcapone - A Love I Can Feel - Studio One 3 Freddie McGregor - When I’m Ready - Studio One 4 George Scott - Love You Still - Studio One 5 Cornell Campbell - Give Your Love To Me - Gorgon 6 Prince Jazzbo - Straight To I-Roy Head - Lagoon 7 Shinehead - Golden Touch - African Love 8 Josey Wales - Weh Dem A Go Do “86" - Tuff Gong 9 Nana McClean - Nana’s Medley - Penthouse 10 Sanchez - Wont Last A Day - Germain 11 Tony Tuff - I've Got To Get You - Penthouse 12 Richie Stephens - Trying To Get To You - Penthouse 13 Tony Rebel - Fresh Vegetable - Penthouse 14 Pinchers - Stand By Me Pt. 2 - Penthouse 15 Sanchez - I Can’t Wait - Digital B 16 Beres Hammond - Tempted To Touch 17 Beres Hammond and Cutty Ranks - Love Me Haffi Get 18 Pinchers - Dreams and Illusions - Jammys 19 Frankie Paul - Benefit of the Doubt - Black ScorpioSupport this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/reggae-lover/donationsWant to advertise on this podcast? Go to https://redcircle.com/brands and sign up.

Hear some essential works from the 60s and 70s by the predecessors of rappers and today’s dancehall artists. Who was the first DJ (dancehall deejay)? This is often debated and I’m not going to get into the argument, but I personally credit U-Roy as the DJ daddy. If Daddy U-Roy wasn’t the 1st, then he certainly had the earliest and largest impact with toasting (rapping) over previously recorded instrumentals in the live dancehall setting. Coxsone Dodd, among many other innovations to his credit, pioneered the recording and production of DJs at Studio One. This mix merely touches upon some of this important dancehall history and I intend to thoroughly exhibit more of the talented foundation artists in future episodes of the Reggae Lover Podcast. There are too many DJs to name who rose to prominence by delivering rhymes over beats on the Jamaican music scene long before The Sugar Hill Gang's 'Rapper’s Delight' was released in 1979 as the first ever rap record. Playlist 1 Junior Byles - Beat Down Babylon 2 Lyricson and Dennis Alcapone - Alpha and Omega 3 Cuture - Zion Gate 4 Prince Mohammed - 40 Leg Dread 5 Johnny Osborne - Murderer 6 Lone Ranger - Keep On Coming A Dance 7 Mighty Diamonds - Pass the Kutchie 8 Charlie Chaplin - Bubbling Telephone 9 Carlton and The Shoes - Love Me Forever 10 Dennis Alcapone - Forever Version 11 Dennis Brown - Money In My Pocket 12 Big Youth - Ah So We Stay 13 Barrington Levy - Mine Your Mouth 14 Louie Lepke - Late Night Movie 15 Alexander Henry - Please Be True 16 Johnny Osborne - Sing Jay Stylee 17 Big Youth - Dread Is Best 18 Delroy Wilson - Never Conqueror (Cousins version) 19 Dennis Alcapone - The Conqueror (Studio One version) 20 Dennis Brown - How Could I Leave 21 Prince Mohammed - Bubbling Love 22 The Heptones - Pretty Looks 23 Michigan and Smiley - Compliment To Studio One 24 Larry Marshall - Throw Me Corn 25 Rude Boyz International - Bring Back The Loving (dub plate) 26 The Techniques - Queen Majesty 27 U-Roy - Chalice In the Palace 28 Gregory Isaacs and U-Roy - Love Is Overdue 29 Jacob Miller and U Brown - Keep On Knocking 30 Freddie McGregor - Bobby Babylon 31 Lone Ranger - No Call Me Cracky 32 Dennis Brown - Sitting and Watching 33 Ranking Dread - Lots of Loving 34 Willie Williams - Armageddon Time 35 Michigan and Smiley - Nice Up the Dance 36 Slim Smith - Never Let Go 37 Lone Ranger - The Answer 38 Horace Andy - Fever 39 Jim Brown - Cure Fi the FeverSupport this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/reggae-lover/donationsWant to advertise on this podcast? Go to https://redcircle.com/brands and sign up.

The Diseases riddim, which is sometimes referred to or known as the Golden Hen riddim. I call it the Worries in the Dance Riddim, but the original version of the instrumental was used for the song entitled "Mad Mad" produced in the 1960s by Coxsone Dodd for his Studio One label featuring Alton Ellis on the main vocals. Therefore the original name of this riddim is Mad Mad. This mix starts with Mad Mad by Alton Ellis and goes all the way to Sizzla in the end. I will publish the Track list later perhaps. If you want the playlist, leave a comment. Thank you for listening to and sharing this. #ReggaeLoverPodcast Apple Podcast (iTunes) link: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/reggae-lover/id1126663530?mt=2h Stitcher Radio link: http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/reggae-lover/the-reggae-lover-podast Google Play link: https://play.google.com/music/m/Ixihhi6rfw26zi6333hocwv6diq?t=Reggae_LoverSupport this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/reggae-lover/donationsWant to advertise on this podcast? Go to https://redcircle.com/brands and sign up.

The best real rock riddim mix you ever heard? Take a listen. The Crown Prince of Reggae, Dennis Emmanuel Brown kicks off the mix and closes it out with the same song in a different style. The Real Rock Riddim is the most versioned reggae Riddim and the most sampled reggae instrumental in history. The original was played in 1967 by one of Coxsone Dodd’s session bands at Studio One, the Sound Dimension band. Ever since then it's been a foundation instrumental for dancehall and reggae. The real rock is just a part of Reggae music that is never going to stop. You are going to hear that beat in movies, on your radio, on your mix tapes, and in your parties. I kept the mix short and spicy so it doesn’t get boring. If you love reggae music and have been listening from back in the days, then this should be nostalgic for you. Please enjoy this as its a dedication to you, REGGAE LOVER,Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/reggae-lover/donationsWant to advertise on this podcast? Go to https://redcircle.com/brands and sign up.

Why is Sugar Minott considered a dancehall pioneer? Listen to Reggae Lover Podcast 86 to find out. In a live dancehall setting during the 1970s, it was common for artists to perform over pre-recorded instrumentals. Sugar Minott was the first artist to recreate that style inside the studio. He worked with Coxsone Dodd and sang new lyrics over the instrumentals of popular Studio One songs. After leaving Studio One, Minott founded his own record label called the Black Roots. He also founded a sound system called Youth Man Promotions, and later a record label by the same name. His vision was to give young artists an outlet, and a chance to make their name in the music business. Sugar Minott moved to England where he was achieving more success than he was in Jamaica. The lover's rock craze started in the UK and Sugar was one of the major players in that movement. While in England he discovered the group Musical Youth. Back in Jamaica, he's also credited with discovering many young talents. He gave unknown artists the chance to perform live in the Dancehall and record for the first time. It was Sugar Minott who actually recorded Garnet Silk's first song. Other artists associated with the Black Roots and Youthman Promotion movements include Barrington Levy, Little John, Nitty Gritty, Tenor Saw, Junior Reid, Jah Stitch, Ranking Dread and Ranking Joe. Sugar was a very Dynamic, versatile artist with successful records in different styles. Lovers rock, Roots, covers, dancehall style, and original written material. Sugar Minott recorded for his own record labels, and he worked with other top labels and producers. Working with Mikey Dread, George Phang, Sly and Robbie Jammys, Channel One and with the Bullwackies label out of New York City. Sugar Minott recorded over 60 albums and countless singles. He passed away in 2010 to heart disease. To see him on stage I was very impressed. Even in his old age, he was a very energetic performer, acting out scenes, jumping, prancing and dancing across the stage. All with his voice still sounding sweet like sugar. Very comfortable in a dancehall setting, he would ask the band or the selector to play some Studio One, and he could sing for hours - entertaining and thrilling the crowd. I salute the great Sugar Minott. His legacy lives on with his daughter Pashon Minott who is a bonafide recording artist in her own rights. If you enjoy this mix I hope you will add some of the songs to your music collection.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/reggae-lover/donationsWant to advertise on this podcast? Go to https://redcircle.com/brands and sign up.

The producer Joe Gibbs, hardcore Jamaican entrepreneur, engineer, and record producer started recording artists in the back of his electronics repair shop in 1966. He worked with Lee "Scratch" Perry who had left the employ of Coxsone Dodd's Studio One. Bunny Lee helped them form The Amalgamated record label. Soon 'Niney The Observer' joined the team and they were able to produce Rocksteady era hits. In 1972, Errol Thompson came on board as the chief engineer and together with Joe Gibbs formed "The Mighty Two." Their studio band called The Professionals featured bassist Sly Dunbar, drummer Robbie Shakespeare, and guitarist Earl "Chinna" Smith. Hundreds of hits came out including "Money in My Pocket" by Dennis Brown and "A So We Stay" by Big Youth. In 1977 the Culture album entitled "Two Sevens Clash" debuted and became a smash hit which coincided with the punk rock craze in the UK.  Artists recorded and produced by Joe Gibbs included Dennis Brown, Jacob Miller, Gregory Isaacs, Junior Byles, Barrington Levy, Cornell Campbell, Delroy Wilson, Beres Hammond, JC Lodge, Marcia Aitken, Althea and Donna, Ranking Joe and Peter Tosh. The list goes on and on. In the new millennium, Joe Gibbs focused on marketing his back catalog.  Joe Gibbs passed on to Zion in February 2008.  He had over 100 Jamaica number one hits and over a dozen UK hits. He released music on an array of different record labels. An amazing body of work, the Joe Gibbs catalog includes some very important songs in the story of Jamaican music.  Salute to the icon, the giant, one of the greatest producers ever - Joe Gibbs.  Please subscribe to the reggae lover podcast. Please share and invite others to listen. Email your requests and feedback to reggaeloverpodcast@gmail.com.   Until next time, keep it positive. This is Kahlil Wonda from Highlanda Sound saying Jah bless. Apple Podcast (iTunes) link: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/reggae-lover/id1126663530?mt=2&app=podcast&at=11l6hT iHeartRadio link: https://www.iheart.com/podcast/269-Reggae-Lover-29076656/ Stitcher Radio link: http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/reggae-lover/the-reggae-lover-podast Google Play link: https://play.google.com/music/m/Ixihhi6rfw26zi6333hocwv6diq?t=Reggae_Lover TuneIn Radio link: https://tunein.com/radio/Reggae-Lover-p1033580/Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/reggae-lover/donationsWant to advertise on this podcast? Go to https://redcircle.com/brands and sign up.