Words of Our Mouth, Meditations of Our Heart. Kenneth Bilby
sometimes songs they had written) were now being sold around the world for profits they would never see, they found that they had little or no legal recourse, since they lacked proper documentation of the circumstances of composition or recording. But the session musicians—the instrumentalists on whose talents the entire enterprise rested—suffered the added indignity of receiving virtually no credit for their efforts. While some singers at least achieved a measure of fame and were able to translate this into new opportunities for live performance and touring abroad, most of the foundational musicians, as times changed and new musical trends took over, were forgotten and languished in obscurity.
Adding insult to injury, many of the first generation of “producers” themselves went on to gain a certain celebrity, eclipsing the musicians who had worked for them. Confronted with a growing variety of Jamaican releases that typically featured prominent “production” credits but little or no information on instrumentalists, fans began to identify particular sonic qualities and stylistic traits with specific studios and producers rather than the revolving “stables” of musicians on whom they depended. “Producers” became as “legendary” for what was thought of as “their” music as for the romanticized stories told about their exploits in Jamaica’s “cutthroat” music business. To a large extent, scholars, music journalists, and other writers have followed suit, treating well-known producers, most of whom were essentially small businessmen looking to turn a quick profit, as if they deserve primary credit for the creative output of the musicians they employed on a temporary basis. Strange as it might seem, the names (or nicknames) of these nonmusician entrepreneurs (for example, Clement “Sir Coxsone” Dodd, Arthur “Duke” Reid, Harry Johnson [“Harry J”], Bunny “Striker” Lee, Vincent “Randy” Chin, Joel Gibson [“Joe Gibbs”], Lloyd “Matador” Daley, Sonia Pottinger, Lawrence Lindo [“Jack Ruby”], Joseph [“Jo Jo”] Hookim, Alvin “G.G.” Ranglin, and Leslie Kong, among others) are today much more likely to be recognized by aficionados of reggae than those of the founding musicians who actually created and performed the sounds that mean so much to so many around the world.
If one chooses to focus on the founding musicians themselves, rather than their employers, the implications are far-reaching. Consider the backgrounds of these foundational players. Although formally trained and highly experienced professional musicians always have played an important role in Jamaican studios—and during the transition from American-style rhythm and blues to ska they were particularly prominent—sessions were, from the beginning, open to anyone who could bring interesting musical ideas and could play with the right “feel.” Over time, as migration from rural areas increased, more and more people from Kingston’s expanding periphery, many of them recently arrived from country parts, turned to the rapidly growing music industry as a means of subsistence. Although few in Jamaica could afford a formal education in music, life across the island was full of music of a noncommoditized kind—music that formed part of the fabric of daily life—and some of those who had participated in such “traditional” musical settings in the countryside or on the urban fringe might well think of themselves as bearers of “natural” musical gifts. As it turned out, more than a few such individuals were able to work up the courage to try their hands in the studios, and before long they were to become a critical part of the mix that produced Jamaica’s distinctive popular sound.
Whether urban or rural, trained or untrained, session musicians are key to the understanding of how this popular music evolved. As a vernacular tradition, a genuine “people’s music,” reggae (in its broadest sense) has always been viewed by the society from which it sprang as an expression of something greater than individual creativity (although individual artistry is certainly appreciated in Jamaica). Like all popular musics, its success, artistic as well as commercial, depended on broad appeal. As the business of Jamaican popular music grew, the participants in the best position to coax forth new sounds that would appeal to the broadest possible cross-section of the population were not those who happened to be skilled in the arts of promotion and marketing, but rather those who, at a profound level, shared a preexisting musical language with the majority of their countrymen and were capable, in the contrived setting of the studio, of translating this effectively into fresh and original, yet locally rooted, syntheses. Rather than the “producers” who provided them with material incentives, or the mobile sound systems that made their recordings available to the masses and became a crucial part of the feedback loop on which they depended, it was Jamaica’s hard-working session musicians themselves who represented the primary creative interface between Jamaican popular music and the Jamaican people.
PERSONAL AS WELL AS professional predilections lie behind this book. Jamaican sounds have been with me from as far back as I can remember. My maternal grandmother lived a good portion of her life on the island. After growing up in Kingston as a young child in the early 1900s and then moving to the United States, she returned to spend much of her adult life in the northern parish of St. Ann between the 1940s and 1970s. She had a keen ear and an artist’s eye, and Jamaica’s physical beauty and cultural richness had much to do with her choice to take up residence there once again as an adult. My mother, in turn, absorbed Caribbean rhythmic and melodic sensibilities in her youth while visiting my grandmother in Jamaica, and also while participating as an amateur musician and composer in the North American vogue for calypso music during the 1940s and 1950s. One of my fondest early memories is that of romping on my hands and knees underneath my mother’s baby grand piano to the magical outpouring of Caribbean-derived rhythms overhead.
My first trip to Jamaica occurred when I was too young to remember anything. But musical memories from later in my childhood have stayed with me. I can remember the strains of mento played by string bands at tourist spots in and around Kingston, the fifing and drumming of Jonkonnu troupes parading outdoors over the Christmas holidays, and the barely audible pulse of unseen drums wafting across the jasmine-laced night air of the St. Ann hills. At a tender age, I began to associate these sounds with the sensory wonders of the environment in which I encountered them—the amazingly lush landscape, the profusion of powerful fragrances, the vibrant colors, the narrow streets bustling with unfamiliar cadences of speech and movement, and the incredible brilliance of the Caribbean moon. While still a young child, I learned from concerned Jamaicans to be aware of duppies, or ghosts, which, I was told, inhabited the tangled roots of cotton trees but also wandered about at night and could become troublesome and dangerous if encountered under the wrong circumstances. I came to feel that the entire place was pervaded by spirits, especially at night, and all the music I heard in Jamaica as a child—even some of the more familiar American tunes coming out of radios—somehow came to be imbued with a peculiarly Jamaican spiritual charge. Though only a visitor, and though my contacts with Jamaicans were mostly superficial, it was hard at this impressionable age not to come under the spell of the island.
Later still, on visits to my grandmother as a young teenager, I remember being intrigued by the rumbling bass and pumping accents of rocksteady and early reggae while passing sound systems on the streets of St. Ann’s Bay, scarcely aware that I was witnessing the birth of a major new form of music. I remember late one night, toward the end of the 1960s, happening upon a Jamaican band playing on a small stage for a local crowd of dancers at a rough-edged nightspot in Ocho Rios. As potent as the vaguely familiar beat was, I was too fixed on the countercultural energy of the rock explosion then dominating the U.S. airwaves to pay more than passing attention. I remember another time, at age sixteen, accompanying a group of friends on a trip into the hills of St. Ann to sample the wisdom of some dreadlocked Rastafarian brethren; the local music that was a conspicuous part of the backdrop made only a vague impression at the time. It wasn’t that I was completely oblivious to the signs at every turn that some new cultural energy was bubbling up in Jamaica. But music had always been everywhere in Jamaica, and people seemed to take it for granted. I took it for granted too.
In the 1970s, when I entered college and began to study ethnomusicology, it seemed only natural for me to gravitate back to Jamaica. The island’s first film of note, The Harder They Come, starring Jimmy Cliff, had recently become a cult hit in the United States, and Bob Marley’s star was on the rise as well. Under Prime Minister Michael Manley, Jamaica had become a major force in progressive Third World politics, and the country’s burgeoning popular music scene had much to do with its sudden entry onto the world stage. Having continued to visit my grandmother in Jamaica into