Origin Story · Volume 11

REGGAE

Ska to Roots, and the Sound System That Invented the Remix, 1962–1978

Where it sits on the century

19151962–19782030

$14.99Paperback
about 120 pages

$13.49 each from three copies, $11.49 from sixteen, and $299.00 for all thirty-one with every ebook and audiobook included. Postage is free on every order over $79.

This is the complete story of Jamaican music from independence to the end of the roots era, in about three hours: the sound-system war between an ex-policeman and a farm worker back from the American South; the one-off acetate whose whole value was that nobody else had it; the B-side that came back from the cutting room without its vocal and founded the version economy; the radio repairman in Waterhouse whose secondhand four-track desk invented the remix; and the backyard studio where four tracks were bounced into weather.

It takes the money seriously, because almost nobody else has: what a session actually paid, and who owned the tape forever after. Why a riddim behaves like land, and who collected rent on it. What flat-fee British licensing meant for the singer of a number-one record. And what the one great international deal did to the two men who were not its star.

It treats Rastafari as what it is — a religion with a history and a martyrology, load-bearing for the roots era — and it is honest about its sources: session paperwork barely exists, credits are often wrong, and where the standard account rests on one man’s telling, the text says so.

Contains no song lyrics — in any language, patois included. That is a deliberate rule, explained on the first page. What replaces them is a description of what these records actually do — the bar where the drums vanish, the deejay’s phrase landing in the singer’s rest.

Format: Paperback
Trim: 5.5 × 8.5 in
Pages: about 120
Chapters: 23 in five movements
Period: 1962–1978
Audiobook: 2h 55m

The playlist

ORIGIN STORY: Reggae — public, and sequenced to the order the records appear in Movement Three. The book describes them; the playlist plays them.

Volume 19
HIP-HOPthe sound system’s method, carried to the Bronx in a twelve-year-old’s memory and applied to funk→Volume 21
HOUSE & TECHNOthe DJ-centred room and the borrowed word dub, rebuilt in Chicago and Detroit with machines→Volume 22
RAVE & JUNGLEthe rig, the MC and the dubplate, naturalised in Britain and run at double speed→

Free to read · the opening

How volume 11 starts.

Origin Story · Volume 11 · REGGAEIntroduction

The Record Was Not the Product

In 1955, if you were young and poor in Kingston, Jamaica, and you wanted to hear the music you loved, you did not buy a record. You could not afford a record player, and the radio (one station, then two, run from uptown) did not play the music anyway.

You went to a dance. Somebody had strung lights across a fenced yard, set up a bar, and stacked loudspeaker boxes the size of wardrobes against a zinc wall. Admission cost a coin. The man who owned the boxes played American rhythm and blues records, one after another, loudly, all night, records you could not hear anywhere else on the island, records he had gone to some trouble to get and went to more trouble to keep secret. The bar sold beer and white rum, the kitchen sold curried goat, and the whole apparatus, boxes, amplifier, records, van, crew, was called a sound system.

That arrangement is upside down from the rest of the twentieth-century record business.

In New York or London, a record was a product. It was manufactured in the thousands, promoted on the radio, and sold to the public, and everything else (performance, broadcast, the shop window) existed to move copies. In Kingston the record was not the product. Most of the audience would never own a record player. The product was the dance: the night, the bass, the bar takings. The record was a tool of the trade, and like any tool of any trade, its value depended on other people not having one. A record everybody owned was worth nothing to a sound man. A record nobody else could get (one copy, on soft acetate, its label scratched off so a rival could not read it) was worth more than money, and was paid for accordingly.

The introduction runs on for another 8 paragraphs, and then the book starts. 23 chapters · about 120 pages · $14.99

Contents

23 chapters, five movements.

Every volume in the series runs the same five, in this order. What each movement is for.

01The Room4 chapters

1The Lawn
2Independence at 130 Beats Per Minute
3The Music Slows Down
4The Faith

02The Machine5 chapters

5The Rig
6The Studio and the Seven-Inch
7The B-Side That Emptied Itself
8The Man in the Radio Shop
9Four Tracks in a Backyard

03The Records5 chapters

101960–1965. The New Beat
111966–1968. The Golden Two Years
121969–1972. The Export Records
131973–1977. The Roots Records
14The Records the Canon Dropped

04The Money5 chapters

15The Man Who Paid for the Session
16The Riddim as Real Estate
17England Buys the Island
18The Deal That Made One Man Global
19What These Records Earn Now

05The Ending4 chapters

20Nineteen Seventy-Eight
21What England Did With It
22The Machine Emigrates
23The Island Kept the Dance

Free to read · reference

REGGAE: the dates.

The book’s own timeline, in full and free to quote. 24 entries, 1962–1978. Where a date is contested the book says so at the point it appears; these are the ones that are not in serious dispute. All thirty-one timelines on one page.

1930

Ras Tafari Makonnen is crowned Emperor Haile Selassie I of Ethiopia. Preachers in Jamaica, reading the coronation through Marcus Garvey, found what becomes Rastafari.

1940

Leonard Howell establishes the Pinnacle commune at Sligoville. It is raided repeatedly and destroyed in 1954; its people scatter into West Kingston.

Early 1950s

Tom the Great Sebastian, with Hedley Jones’s hand-built amplifiers, sets the sound-system template. Duke Reid and Coxsone Dodd build the trade’s great rivalry.

Late 1950s

the American rhythm and blues supply dries up; the sound men begin commissioning local recordings, first as one-off exclusives.

1960

Prince Buster records the Folkes Brothers with Count Ossie’s Rastafarian drummers: Oh Carolina.

1962

Jamaica becomes independent, 6 August. Ska is the new nation’s sound. Island Records moves to London.

1963

Studio One opens on Brentford Road. In April, the Coral Gardens incident: Rastafari rounded up, beaten and jailed across St James; the state apologises in 2017.

1964

Simmer Down; the Skatalites form; My Boy Lollipop reaches number two in Britain and America.

1965

Don Drummond kills Anita Mahfood and is committed; the Skatalites dissolve within the year.

1966

21 April: Haile Selassie I lands at Palisadoes before an enormous crowd. State of emergency in West Kingston. The music slows: rocksteady begins.

1967

Treasure Isle’s golden run. In Spanish Town, in the standard telling, an acetate cut without its vocal, the version is discovered.

1968

Do the Reggay names the new beat. The Twelve Tribes of Israel is founded. The Rodney riots. Trojan Records is formed in London.

1969

Israelites is the first Jamaican record at number one in Britain; the skinhead reggae boom begins. Duke Reid begins pressing versions on B-sides as standard.

1970

U-Roy’s first Treasure Isle sides make the deejay a recording artist; the standard telling has them holding the top chart places simultaneously in early 1971.

1971

Double Barrel at number one in Britain. Better Must Come.

1972

Michael Manley wins power with the yards’ music as soundtrack. The Harder They Come premieres at the Carib. King Tubby acquires the Dynamic console; Channel One opens on Maxfield Avenue.

1973

Catch a Fire, in the lighter sleeve. The Black Ark is built. The contested first dub albums appear. Clive Campbell, Kingston-born, throws a party in the Bronx, the hip-hop volume begins.

1974–75

dub becomes the standard B-side; rockers drumming retools the beat; Island’s roots signings multiply. September 1974: Haile Selassie is deposed; he dies in custody in August 1975.

1975

Marcus Garvey. Trojan goes into receivership. Louisa Mark’s Caught You in a Lie opens lovers rock in London.

1976

Police and Thieves; the Notting Hill Carnival clashes. 3 December: gunmen shoot Bob Marley, Rita Marley and Don Taylor at Hope Road; the Smile Jamaica concert happens anyway; Marley leaves for London.

1977

Exodus, recorded in exile, stays on the British album chart for over a year. Two Sevens Clash subdues Kingston on the seventh of July. Heart of the Congos at the Black Ark.

1978

January: the Green Bay ambush. February: Uptown Top Ranking, two Kingston teenagers over a 1967 riddim, at number one in Britain. 22 April: the One Love Peace Concert, the handshake on stage; Peter Tosh’s address from the same stage, and his beating in custody months later. The truce collapses; the dance turns toward dancehall. This book’s span ends.

1979–1981

2 Tone revives ska in the British Midlands. The 1980 Jamaican election kills hundreds. Bob Marley dies in May 1981, aged thirty-six, leaving no will.

1989

King Tubby is shot dead outside his home. Island Records is sold. The machine this book described is, by now, everywhere.

Free to read · where it comes from

The sources.

This series is written from published material and its byline claims method rather than credentials, so the sources are listed. They are given as books and categories of material rather than page citations; where a claim in the text is contested, the text says so at the point of the claim. A general warning applies to this volume more than to any other in the series: Jamaican session documentation for this period is thin to nonexistent, label credits are frequently absent or wrong, and much of the standard account rests on interviews given decades after the events. The text has tried to carry that warning into every sentence that needed it.

General histories. Bass Culture: When Reggae Was King, Lloyd Bradley, the fullest single narrative of the music from the sound-system era to dancehall, and the account that takes the operators’ business seriously. Solid Foundation: An Oral History of Reggae, David Katz, interviews with a very large share of the era’s surviving participants, and the source of many of the tellings this book flags as tellings. The Rough Guide to Reggae, Steve Barrow and Peter Dalton, discographical backbone; Barrow’s compilation annotations for the London reissue labels are among the most careful scholarship in the field.

The machine. Dub: Soundscapes and Shattered Songs in Jamaican Reggae, Michael Veal, the standard technical and cultural study of the mixing-desk era, and the principal published source on King Tubby’s methods and equipment. Cut 'n’ Mix, Dick Hebdige, and Wake the Town and Tell the People: Dancehall Culture in Jamaica, Norman Stolzoff, the sound system as institution, the latter an ethnography of the dance economy.

Rastafari. The Rastafarians, Leonard Barrett; Rastafari: Roots and Ideology, Barry Chevannes, the standard scholarly accounts. The First Rasta: Leonard Howell and the Rise of Rastafarianism, Hélène Lee, Howell and Pinnacle. On Coral Gardens, the survivor testimony gathered in Bad Friday projects and the reporting around the Jamaican government’s 2017 apology. The attribution problems around the Garvey prophecy are discussed in the scholarly literature on the movement’s origins, and the text states them.

Marley and the international era. Catch a Fire: The Life of Bob Marley, Timothy White, read with the caution owed to its novelistic method; Bob Marley: The Untold Story, Chris Salewicz; The Book of Exodus, Vivien Goldman, for the London exile period; Chris Blackwell’s memoir The Islander, an interested party’s account and used as such. The Sims–Cayman publishing entanglement and the estate litigation were reported extensively in the music trade press and court coverage from the 1980s onward. Aston Barrett’s royalties claim was reported from the London High Court in 2006.

Producers and participants. People Funny Boy: The Genius of Lee "Scratch" Perry, David Katz. Interviews given across the decades by Bunny Wailer, Peter Tosh, Alton Ellis, Marcia Griffiths, Bob Andy, Leroy Sibbles, Dawn Penn, U-Roy, Bunny Lee and Prince Buster, in the music press and in documentary film, the version-discovery story, the wage figures and the credit disputes in this book rest on this class of source, and the text says so wherever it uses them.

The British side. Bass Culture again; Sounds Like London, Lloyd Bradley, for the sound systems, lovers rock and British reggae; the British music weeklies 1969–1980 for the chart era, the punk alliance and Rock Against Racism; the documentary record on Duke Vin and the first British sounds.

For chart positions and dates, the Official Charts Company (UK) and Billboard (US) archives, and (used with the scepticism the text applies) the loosely compiled Jamaican charts of the period as reported in the island’s press.

Where figures are disputed (session fees, sales counts, the Island advance, the first dub album, the size of the crowd at Palisadoes, who invented ska) the text says so rather than choosing. Those disagreements are not gaps in the record. In this volume especially, they are the record.

What this book does not do

Start with the absences, because they shape everything that follows.

This book quotes no song lyrics. Not one line, not one phrase, and not in patois either. That last part matters here, because the words of these songs carry their politics, and a book that cannot quote them has to work harder than usual. What it does instead is tell you what a vocal is doing (where it sits against the drums, what a toaster’s phrases land on, what subject a song addresses and how directly) which turns out to be most of what a quotation would have told you, without the licensing question that no publisher can answer at a safe price.

It reproduces no album art and no photographs, and it cannot play you a record. There is a playlist for this book, on the same app you may be reading or listening on, sequenced to the order the records appear in these pages. It is called ORIGIN STORY: Reggae. Search for it by name. Everything described in Movement Three is on it, in order, and this book is substantially better with it running, because this is music built for a specific loudspeaker, and words about bass are a thin substitute for bass.

One further warning, and it is a promise about honesty rather than an apology. The documentary record of Jamaican music in this period is thin. Session paperwork mostly does not exist or was never made; label credits are frequently absent, wrong, or assigned to whoever owned the studio; and a large share of the standard history rests on interviews given twenty and thirty years after the events, by participants with long memories and live grievances. Where the account in this book comes from one person’s telling, the sentence says so. Where two tellings disagree, both are given. Where nobody knows, that is stated too, because in this subject the gaps are not failures of research. They are the record.

Finally: Rastafari appears in this book as what it is (a religion, with a history, a theology and a martyrology) and not as a set of colours and an accent. The roots era cannot be understood without it, and it cannot be understood as decoration.

Where the record is contested, this book says so. Sources are listed at the back.

Shelved under

MUSIC / History & Criticism · MUSIC / Genres & Styles / Reggae · MUSIC / Business Aspects

Identifiers

Ebook ISBN: 979-8-90623-895-5
Audiobook ISBN: 979-8-90623-896-2
Paperback ISBN: not yet issued

Buy it

Paperback, $14.99, posted direct. Every ebook and audiobook comes free with the complete set.

Questions

About this volume.

What is Origin Story volume 11 about?

Ska to Roots, and the Sound System That Invented the Remix, 1962–1978. In 1955 Kingston, if you wanted to hear the music you loved, you did not buy a record — you could not afford a record player. You paid a coin at a gate and stood in front of a wall of hand-built speaker boxes. The record was not the product. The dance was, and everything the rest of the world now takes for granted about DJs, remixes and bass follows from that one inversion.

What years does REGGAE cover?

1962–1978. The volume is numbered 11 because that is where the genre sits in the chronology of the music, not the order the books were written in — the first three written were volumes 17, 19 and 21.

What made REGGAE possible?

The sound system and the dub desk. Movement Two of every volume is about the technology that made the genre possible and would not have ten years earlier.

Are there song lyrics in it?

None. Not one line, in this volume or in any of the thirty-one. Lyrics are copyrighted expression, licensing is negotiated song by song and publisher by publisher, and there is no safe quantity — so the rule is zero, and a program checks the manuscript, the EPUB and the narration script against it before the volume ships. What replaces them is a description of what the record actually sounds like, what it cost, and who was paid.

How long is it?

About 29,000 words: 23 chapters across five movements, roughly 120 minutes’ reading, 120 pages in the paperback. The audiobook runs 2h 55m.

What is in the back of the book?

A dated timeline of 24 entries, a source list, and a note on what the volume does not do. All three are reproduced free on this page.

Can I buy REGGAE in print?

Yes, here. It is a 5.5 × 8.5 in paperback, 60# uncoated cream, black ink, about 120 pages, and it never goes out of print.