From Mento to Dub-The Origins of Ska and Reggae

[Edie Antoinette]

The origins of Reggae can be traced back to the many forms of folk music that were popular in Jamaica in the 1950's. The first recorded Jamaican music was Mento which drew heavily from all the forms of folk music. It was often referred to as Jamaican Calypso, however only some of the more uptempo Mento tunes sounded similar to Calypso. Mento music had begun in the 1940's and by the time it reached the first Jamaican recording studio in the winter of 1951-52, it was well-established and very popular.

In the 1940's the phenomenon known as the 'sound system' began to replace live musicians, principally because it was cheaper. The sound systems played US R&B and later their own Jamaican-recorded R&B, which although initially copied the US style, evolved over a couple of years into a distinctively Jamaican sound. This sound drew from Mento as well as R&B and by the end of 1961 had evolved into Ska.

Ska remained popular throughout the 60's, however from 1965 to 1967, the ghetto youth of West Kingston were developing their own version of Ska which was referred to as 'Rude-Boy' music. It was a more dynamic version of Ska and its lyrics addressed their ghetto lifestyle.

In 1966, Ska had also begun to evolve into the much slower, cooler and more refined sound of 'Rocksteady' as a result of the various Soul styles also popular at that time. Rocksteady flourished until 1968 when it evolved into what is now labelled as 'Reggae'. Reggae became a term which encompassed the many developing styles of Jamaican music characterised by the trademark 'skank'. By the mid 1970's, Roots reggae had developed which concerned itself with the life of the ghetto sufferer, with reality, with truths and rights. Many Roots artistes drew on Rastafarian ideologies and indeed this dominated its lyrics.

In the early 1970's, Reggae produced yet another offshoot in the form of Dub. Dub, which is now used throughout the world of dance music to describe a remix, originated in Jamaica in 1967, initially in the quest for sound-system exclusivity. Dub, in the now familiar form of radically remixed versions of tunes with the lyrics stripped down or removed, arrived in 1972, and was largely due to the contribution of King Tubby, boss of the leading sound-system in Kingston and a superb engineer.

By the early 1980's however, the Dub craze had run its course and few dub sets were being issued. In recent years, 'version' sides of new Jamaican 45's have harked back to the form's golden age. However the revival of interest from the outside world in vintage 1970's Dub has yet to prompt any return to a regular supply of new Dub albums from Kingston.

For decades, beginning in the 1920’s, the dominant music in the Caribbean was Trinidad-based calypso. The lilting, topical and frequently risqué songs were initially sung in an African-French patois but began to switch to English as the music began to attract the interest of American record labels such as Decca and Bluebird.

Post World War II saw the emergence of various Caribbean music forms, notably steel-pan music of Trinidad and Tobago. In the late 40’s and early 50’s, Jamaican musicians began combining the steel-pan and calypso strains with an indigenous mento beat (e.g. Harry Belafonte - Jamaica Farewell).

During the 1950’s Jamaican youth was turning away from the American pop foisted on them by Radio Jamaica Rediffusion (RJR) and the Jamaican Broadcasting Corporation (JBC). Weather conditions permitting they listened instead to the sinewy music being played on New Orleans stations or Miami’s powerful WINZ, whose playlists included records by Amos Milburn, Rosco Gordon and Louis Jordan. Significant New Orleans artists of the time included Fats Domino, Jelly Roll Morton, Champion Jack Dupree and Professor Longhair. It is surmised that the delay effects which are an important part of the reggae/dub sound may have initially been inspired by the oscillations in the signal from these far away radio stations.

During this period, Jamaican bands began covering U.S. R&B hits, but the more adventurous took the nuts and bolts of the sound and melded them with energetic jazz conceits - particularly in the ever-present horn section - and emerged around 1956 with a hybrid concoction christened ska. Ernest Ranglin, the stellar jazz-rooted Jamaican guitarist who backed up the Wailers on such ska classics as "Love and Affection" and "Cry to Me," says that the word was coined by musicians "to talk about the skat! skat! skat! scratchin’ guitar strum that goes behind."

Practically overnight, ska spawned a major Jamaican industry, the Sound System, whereby enterprising record shop D.J.’s with reliable U.S. connections for 45’s would load a pair of hefty P.A. speakers into a pickup truck and tour the island from hilltop to savanna, spinning the latest hits. D.J.’s also gave themselves comic book nom de plumes like Prince Buster and Sir Coxsone Downbeat. Competition grew so heated that D.J.’s covered up labels or scratched them off so that rivals couldn’t keep up with the latest sounds.

The ska craze spread to London in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s and in the United Kingdom ska soon came to be labelled bluebeat. This music would probably have remained a mere curiosity were it not for the efforts of a white Anglo-Jamaican of aristocratic lineage named Chris Blackwell. As a hobby-like business venture he had set up a small scale distribution network for ethnic records but he had a vision about the potential appeal of Jamaica’s oscillating answer to the blues. In 1962 Blackwell took his tiny Blue Mountain/Island label to England, purchased master tapes produced in Kingston and released them in Britain on Black Swan, Jump Up, Sue and the parent label Island. Initial artists included Jimmy Cliff, the Skatalites and Bob Marley.

In England Blackwell struck up a synergism with the fashion conscious mod and skinhead teenage movements through his seminal Jamaican rock records. His big breakthrough came in 1964 when Millie Small, one of the artists he managed, had a huge U.S. hit with "My Boy Lollipop."

Back in Jamaica "stay and ketch it again" became the rallying cry of Sound System ska. Soon every "Rude Boy" (ghetto tough) and country orphan wanted to hear his own voice barrelling out of a bass speaker. The Wailer’s first single "Simmer Down" was a ska smash in Jamaica in late 1963/early 1964 and called on the island’s young hooligans to control their tempers.

The ska-bluebeat advance into what became rock steady occurred around 1966. James Brown and funky U.S. stuff was cited by Bob Marley as an influence for "de young musicians, deh had a different beat - dis was rock steady now! Eager to go! Du-du-du-du-du... Rock steady goin’ t’rough." Marley was right on target when he linked James Brown with the transition, since R&B was to ska what soul was to rock steady.

As far as Jamaican record buyers were concerned, the origin of the word reggae was the 1968 Pyramid single by Toots and the Maytals "Do the Reggay" (sic). Other possibilities as to the origin of the word include Regga, the name of a Bantu speaking tribe on Lake Tanganyika and a corruption of "streggae," which is Kingston street slang for prostitute. According to Bob Marley, the word is Spanish in origin, meaning "the king’s music" but according to veteran session musicians the word is a description of the beat itself. Hux Brown of the Skatalites and lead guitarist on Paul Simon’s 1972 hit "Mother and Child Reunion" says that it is "just a fun, joke kinda word that means ragged rhythm and the body feeling."

By the 1970’s, the U.S. top 40 hosted several rock steady and early reggae hits, most notably Desmond Dekker and the Aces anti-colonial diatribe "Israelites" (1969), Jimmy Cliff’s "Wonderful World, Beautiful People" (1970) and Paul Simon’s "Mother and Child Reunion" (1972), recorded in 1971 at Dynamic Studios, Kingston. This track in particular helped spark a lively and lucrative cross fertilisation among prominent rock, R&B, punk, disco, funk and New Wave artists during the 1970s and early 1980s.

During 1970 and 1971 a jumble of Wailers singles were fed to the Jamaican audience backed by dub and "version" mixes of the A side. Osbourne "King Tubby" Ruddock was one of the originators of dub. While working as a selector for Duke Reid’s Sound system and for Treasure Isle studio, he began using a dub machine to eliminate vocals from test cuts of a two track single, getting a private charge out of the way the rhythms - in the space of a microsecond - seemed to snap, crackle and then pop like a champagne cork when they had no vocal track to soften them. Equally exciting to him was the abrupt reintroduction of the complete mix "Jus’ like a volcano in yuh head!" Tubby would say.

Springing the effect on a crowded dance hall one evening to blow a few minds (and possibly some speakers -since he liked the prankish ploy to be loud), the "dub-out" stunt was received like a revelation on high. It soon became an essential novelty at the larger jump-ups and then a standard fixture. Everybody began to examine the dub versions closely to determine whether Kingston rhythm sections held their own when stripped naked. Tubby added echo and reverb at ever more erratic intervals to enhance the "haunted house" effect of the stark trompings and backbeats going bump in the tropical night.

By late 1971, Kingstonians’ appetites had been whetted for all-dub LPs and Lee Perry provided a remixed dub of Soul Revolution called Soul Revolution II. Perry eventually got so hooked on dub that he began layering sound effects (train whistles, running water, animal noises) on just about every old track he had in his possession.

The Wailers had been quite successful commercially in the Caribbean during most of Jamaican rock’s evolutionary phases but after signing with Island records in 1972, they issued a string of well received albums on the internationally distributed Island label beginning with Catch a Fire (1973).

Bob Marley and the Wailers’ mesmerising and often incendiary songs were customarily steeped in images of Third World strife and underscored by the turgid tenets of the Ratafarian faith as well as by symbols and maxims derived from Jamaican and African folklore. Rastas smoked "herb" to help with their meditations and the Rastafarian colours were richly symbolic:

Red fe de bloodshed inflicted on the sufferah since slavery days Gold fe de wealth stolen from the sufferah since Solomon's temple was laid low Green fe de blessed land in Africa dat awaits the black mon's return

The Wailers showed themselves to be much more than a mere Jamaican rock phenomenon as their music began to concern itself with social issues on the island but no one in Jamaica was prepared for the impact the music of Marley and company would eventually have world wide. In 1974 Eric Clapton reached the Number 1 spot in The United States and much of Europe with his version of Bob Marley’s anguished shantytown confessional “I Shot the Sheriff.’

Both Peter Tosh and Bunny Wailer left the Wailers in 1975 and have released numerous solo albums and from 1976 onwards, the Wailers concerts were invariably sellouts. Other Jamaican artists to achieve significant commercial success outside Jamaica during this period included Toots and the Maytals, Jimmy Cliff, Johnny Nash and Peter Tosh.

With the coming of punk and the subsequent new wave in the mid to late 1970s, Jamaican influences in music spread still further. In 1979 -1980 an eclectic new sound was introduced by interracial English groups like the Specials, Madness and the English Beat, which combined a ska revival with the antic energies of punk. Among the bands to emerge out of the new wave movement in Britain with reggae stylings were the Clash and the Police.

During the late 1970s and early 1980s the sounds of Jamaica were influencing many New Zealand artists including Coup d’Etat, the Screaming Meemees, the Newmatics, Dread Beat and Blood, Aotearoa and Herbs. Herb's French Letter was originally released in 1982 and re-released in 1995. to coincide with the French resumption of nuclear testing in the South Pacific.

Bob Marley died of cancer in 1981 and in 1987 Peter Tosh was robbed and murdered.

In England reggae influenced and dubby sounds have been transported into the 1990s by acts such as Dub Syndicate, African Head Charge, Jah Wobble’s Invaders of the Heart and Natacha Atlas. Many of these acts fuse Jamaican influences with other sounds from around the world. Jamaican influenced music has mutated further through ragga and jungle into drum n bass.

The influence of ska, reggae and dub music is still strongly evident in contemporary music today as a new generation continues to evolve from the legacy handed down by the great luminaries such as Bob Marley, Peter Tosh and lesser known artists. Internationally, new artists like Ben Harper and Finlay Quaye display strong reggae influences in their work and New Zealand acts embracing these sounds today include the likes of Salmonella Dub and Pitch Black.

References

Barrow, S and Dalton, P. (1997). Reggae - the rough guide. London: Rough Guides.

White, T. (1991). Catch a fire: the life of Bob Marley. London: Omnibus Press.

[Shelley "SoleMann" King]

This is very interesting...My Brother James is into all that Reggae Music and he really knows his stuff....Look at him, can't you tell....ROFLMBO. He loves Peter Tosh

MY BROTHER JAMES

[Edie Antoinette]

Yep, you can tell! Wow!!!! I want to hear some Tosh...

[Shelley "SoleMann" King]

Tosh looks like a giant standing next to Bob and Bunny....LOL

[Edie Antoinette]

I gotta see this....

[Old School C]

Wow, you really dug deep into this genre Mama Edie. I enjoyed reading it. I like how you went WAAAAAAAAAAY back into the 20s and Trinidad. I wish I could find some of that 20s stuff just to some what experience the sound. Before my grandfather died, he told me that his mother was Jamaican and she didnt play lol I dont know much about her though, I will talk to my aunt and try to get some history about her. Thanks again for this one Mama Edie, I really learned alot from this.

[Edie Antoinette]

I learned alot too while preparing it. Thanks for bringing it up C..