Words of Our Mouth, Meditations of Our Heart. Kenneth Bilby
Far I
—Devotional lyric adapted by
Jamaican worshipers from Psalm 19
The half has never been told.” This oft-repeated phrase holds the key to a fundamental Jamaican truth, reminding each generation that no matter how much we think we know, there is always more—much more—to the story. Only with time, patience, and determination can what has long remained hidden be revealed. Nothing in Jamaica embodies this truth better than its music.
The voices and faces in this book speak to this truth from a special vantage point. Not only were these pioneers present when the earliest styles of Jamaican popular music were being born; more important, they themselves were some of the first players and shapers of these styles. Without their creative work, this music, as we know it, quite simply would not exist. Without their portion of the half that remains untold—their memories of the early days and the unique perspectives they can bring—there can be little hope of arriving at a balanced understanding of this music and how it came to be. Their truth is at the heart of this book.
Once scorned and neglected in both its homeland and the Euro-American Capitals of Culture, Jamaica’s popular music has gone on to capture the hearts and minds of people everywhere—and I do mean everywhere. While it is clear enough that this music (and here we must include the distinct genres of ska, rocksteady, and dancehall/ragga along with reggae) has risen to the status of a global art form over the last few decades, it is probably safe to say that no one knows just how vast its actual reach is today. It would take an army of researchers with unlimited time and resources to tally all the local permutations Jamaican music has left in its wake while penetrating virtually every corner of our planet. What we do know is that reggae, like its American cousin hip-hop, has crossed virtually every conceivable border and become one of the world’s most prominent sounds. How could one of the smallest and most economically challenged countries on earth produce a music of such astonishing boundary-breaching power? This in itself remains an enigma—a part, perhaps, of the “half that has never been told.”
Given its remarkable leap from obscurity and disdain to worldwide influence, it is hard to avoid the sense that there is something special and inexplicable about Jamaica’s popular music. What are the actual cultural wellsprings of this music, and who exactly are its creators? Despite the millions of words exchanged about the mysteries of Jamaican music since the global rise of reggae, the readily available answers, in my view, are far from satisfactory. This book is fueled partly by my frustration at this lack of adequate answers to basic questions.
THE NEW SOUNDS of ska, rocksteady, reggae, and dancehall—the distinctive genres of popular music that the world now identifies as Jamaican—came into being primarily in the recording studios of Kingston. On this point there seems to be general agreement. Although the dawn of Jamaica’s recording industry can actually be traced back to the early 1950s, when a handful of cottage enterprises emerged to produce records in the homegrown mento style for limited markets, it was not until the early 1960s that an explosion of recording activity began, unleashing an extraordinary new wave of musical creativity. The birth of Jamaica’s first urban popular music, ska, coincided precisely with the sudden appearance of full-fledged, modern recording facilities in the capital of the newly independent nation, and the major stylistic shifts that followed, from rocksteady through reggae and dub, grew directly out of Kingston’s rapidly evolving studio culture.
The existence of studios depended on certain things. A basic infrastructure was required, including a physical building, recording equipment, and musical instruments. Technicians were needed, including studio designers, recording engineers, and trained maintenance personnel. Some form of centralized economic management was indispensable, as were individual “producers” who possessed (or were able to scrape together) the financial means to initiate and enable recording sessions. None of this would have amounted to anything, however, without proficient musicians—individuals capable of making appealing musical sounds that could be captured on tape and then rendered into marketable products. In a very real sense, these musicians were the most important link in the chain, the foundation upon which everything else stood. They were the primary creators, the producers of first instance. Their livings depended on their ability to come up with novel sounds in the studio that people would want to listen to, dance to, and buy. Because of the demands placed on them, they were the primary architects of new and original musical styles.
This elementary point, you would think, should be self-evident. Yet it has gone largely unrecognized in the voluminous literature on Jamaican popular music. In fact, the fundamental contribution made by these studio musicians remains woefully underacknowledged. This omission can be attributed in part to certain peculiarities that became entrenched early on as the recording of Jamaican music developed into a profitable business. The bosses in this new enterprise were the studio owners and the producers who assembled musicians for sessions and paid for studio time. Session musicians most often were hired on an ad hoc basis, being paid per song or individual recording. Their creative labor was treated as a kind of piecework, the end product of which belonged solely to those who had paid for it. Not only did producers own and control the resulting master tapes, which they were free to convert into marketable commodities as they wished, but they often felt that they owned the music itself in perpetuity. Some even went so far as to claim authorship (or coauthorship), crediting themselves on record labels as composers, and in some cases copyrighting or publishing songs in their own names.
There were, in fact, many more pieces to this puzzle, and students of Jamaican music will be teasing out the complex factors involved in the growth of this somewhat chaotic local music industry for years to come. On the creative side of things, one can single out certain prominent contributors who played an important role alongside the instrumentalists who provided the musical bedrock. These include singers, songwriters, arrangers, and audio engineers. But as more information comes to light about the recording process during the critical formative years, it becomes increasingly apparent that a large majority of the creative work, especially during this early period, fell on the shoulders of the session musicians who ultimately were responsible for inventing the musical frameworks (and with the advent of multitrack recording, the backing tracks and fundamental “riddims”) upon which hit records (and later, dub versions and deejay tracks) were constructed. More often than not, singers arrived in the studio with little more than a sketch of a song, consisting of partial lyrics and a tentative melody devoid of a harmonic progression or arrangement. The musicians routinely supplied the critical missing elements (including the song’s rhythmic structure) on the spot, through a collaborative process of experimentation and playing-in-the-moment—what might be thought of as a kind of spontaneous composition. These session musicians, in effect, actually doubled as co-composers and arrangers.
Seldom did the producer in charge of a session contribute specific musical suggestions to this fast-moving creative process (although there were exceptions). Indeed, producers were often not even present at the actual sessions. For this reason, Jamaica’s foundational session musicians often point out the need to qualify the term “producer.” It would be more accurate, they say, to characterize most of those who bore this title as “executive producers,” meaning simply the parties who financed the production. According to these musicians, those who typically styled themselves “producers” in Jamaica (with rare exceptions, such as the legendary Lee “Scratch” Perry) were producers only in this financial sense and had very little to do with the actual creation of the music they ended up controlling. Creatively speaking, these musicians insist, they themselves were most often their own producers (although they sometimes also credit audio engineers for innovative contributions, which could feed back into the ways session musicians thought about and played their music).
The peculiar way in which the local recording industry was structured led to a perverse outcome. As markets for Jamaican music expanded over time and the economic potential of the music, including older recordings, increased exponentially, the actual creators of the music watched while the “producers”—those who held the master recordings (and sometimes the legal rights)—received most or all of the resulting windfall. Studio musicians were not alone in being deprived of what they saw as their just deserts. Singers (who often were also songwriters) shared this embittering experience, for most of their recordings had been made