In order to understand the centrality of black
pride in the music created at Studio One, we need look no further than
the life of Clement 'Sir Coxsone' Dodd, a man who with singular purpose
created the first and most important black-owned record company in
Jamaica. From cabinet maker to migrant farm-worker, sound-system
operator to producer to businessman, Clement Dodd was a unique, fiercely
determined, pioneering spirit.
And when Alton Ellis sang of the 'Black Man's Pride' while 'born a
loser' it is as a migrating nightingale soaring upwards into the skies,
lifting listeners to new vistas, to a point high above his birthplace of
Trench Town, one of the poorest ghettoes in Jamaica. Trench Town, or
Trench Pen as it was originally known, and the surrounding areas of
Western Kingston became the central location for both the emergence of
reggae music and the establishment of the Rastafarian movement in the
1960s. It also became a battleground during the explosion of political
and gang violence in the 1970s.
Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, Bunny Wailer, Joe Higgs, Rita Marley, Alton
Ellis, Ken Boothe, Delroy Wilson and Ernest Ranglin: an impressive list
of musical legends, all from Trench Town, Clement Dodd established
Studio One at 13 Brentford Road, just north of Trench Town. A mile east
of Trench Town is Orange Street, or 'Beat Street', which housed a wealth
of record stores owned by the pantheon of Jamaican reggae producers who
emerged in the 1960s and 1970s including Dodd, Vincent 'Randy' Chin,
Prince Buster, Lee 'Scratch' Perry, Joe Gibbs, Augustus Pablo and
Winston Riley. In the 1970s Channel One set up on Maxfield Avenue in the
district's western border.
Trench Town was built by the colonial government as a housing project in
1945. It took its name from Daniel Power Trench, an Irish immigrant who
had used the land to graze livestock in the 18th century. It was an
ambitious social engineering programme, an area of one- and two-storey
concrete buildings built around common courtyards with communal cooking
and washing facilities and a standpipe for water. Known as 'government
yards', it was intended that they would serve as a model for low-income
housing development in the newly independent Jamaica. But this proved to
be a vain hope. A lack of state funding meant the building work was
poor, and initially there was no sewage system. The yards were an effort
to provide low-cost housing to Kingston's rapidly expanding urban
population. there were increasing numbers of squatter settlements as
rural inhabitants migrated into Western Kingston, a popular destination
due to its close proximity to downtown Kingston.
By the 1960s the urban dream had become a nightmare. Trench Town had
become a ramshackle failed social model, surrounded by the even more
squalid shanty town squatter communities of Back-O-Wall and Dungle - the
latter named so because it was also used for dumping rubbish.
The large majority of the music featured here dates from the early
1970s, when solo vocalists Alton Ellis, Horace Andy, John Holt, Dennis
Brown and Freddie McGregor became the mainstay of Studio One's
repertoire. This was in contrast to the vocal and instrumental groups of
the ska and rocksteady eras, which had been the pre-eminent styles in
the previous decade. The house bands that had worked each day at 13
Brentford Road throughout the 1960s - the Skatalites, the Soul Brothers,
Soul Vendors and Sound Dimension - gave way at the start of the 1970s to
new groups the Soul Defenders and the New Establishment, who became the
fresh musical forces backing these powerful vocalists.
A quick glance at the song titles indicates the themes of the new
decade. They tell of hope to build upon the dreams and aspirations of
the newly independent Jamaica of the 1960s that had not yet come to
fruition: 'Build Our Dreams', 'Forgive Them', 'Freedom Fighter', 'Love
And Understanding', 'Equal Rights', 'Love In Our Nation', 'Child Of The
Ghetto' and 'Black Man's Pride'.
Roots reggae was set to become the dominant style in reggae music in the
1970s. But while the righteousness of Rastafarianism is central to all
roots reggae music, it is not the only influence to be found in the
music featured here. The forces that helped define such striking
self-awareness and self-respect in black identity represented herein -
and indeed in so much Jamaican music - are manifold and have a much
longer history. These influences include the rise of the independence
movement in Africa, the American and Caribbean civil rights and Black
Power movements, anti-colonialism and independence in Jamaica,
Negritude, island politricks and inter-island politics. All played their
part in the creation of reggae and black identity in Jamaica.
But the Jamaican people are grounded in a 400-year history of defiance
and rebellion that unifies and strengthens. There were the numerous
slave rebellions, starting with the First Maroon War in 1730, led by
Cudjoe, and ending in the Baptist War of 1831, led by Samuel Sharpe.
There was the establishment of the self-sufficient escaped-slave Maroon
communities of Accompang, Moore Town, Scotts Hall, Trelawny Town and
Charles Town (all located in the dense mountainous region of Cockpit
Country in the parishes of Trelawny and Saint Elizabeth), and Nanny Town
and Moore Town (in the parish of north-eastern Portland). These
struggles help to define Jamaican national identity and lie behind the
power of the music contained here.
This rebel spirit of righteous defiance, self-respect and
self-determination, in this face of systematic and structural oppression
was tapped into by the Rastafarian movement, which began in the 1930s
and reached its apex in the 1970s.
Black Power
These same values are also to be found at the heart of the
Black Power movement in the United States, which began around 1965 and
soon spread through the Caribbean. Black Power and the emergence of the
Black Panther party (for Self-Defence) emerged out of the radicalisation
of the civil rights movement in the United States that began a decade
earlier and reached its peak in the first half of the 1960s under the
leadership of Martin Luther King.
Even though the successes of the civil rights movement were manifest -
including ending segregation and discrimination through the Civil Rights
Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 - members of the emergent
Black Panther party felt that the progress of freedom for African
Americans was too slow and came at too high a price. Some rejected the
idea of integration, embracing the words of the former Nation of Islam
spokesman Malcolm X, who emphasised Pan-Africanism, black
self-determination and black self-defence.
There was a sense of urgency after the assassination of Malcolm X in
1965 and of Martin Luther King in 1968. The escalation of tensions led
to a further radicalisation of the movement as Angela Davis, Huey P
Newton, Eldridge Cleaver, Bobby Seale and other leaders were one by one
hunted down as enemies of the state. They began to advocate the use of
violence as the only response to violence unto themselves.
Marcus Garvey
The radical ideas of the Black Panther party echoed the words
of an earlier black activist, Marcus Garvey, who ran the Universal Negro
Improvement Association (UNIA) and published the Negro World newspaper
from his headquarters in Harlem, New York, from 1916. By 1920 Garvey's
UNIA had an estimated 4 million members across America. Garvey preached
black humanity: black nationalism, black pride and self-sufficiency
through economic empowerment. He also called for the voluntary
repatriation of African-Americans to their African homeland, which
almost became a reality through the setting up of his Black Star Line
shipping company.
In fact, Garvey was Jamaican, and had founded the UNIA in Kingston two
years earlier. He arose at the start of a tumultuous period in Jamaican
history. Notions of independence and an end to British rule and
colonisation were beginning to ferment on the island, which prompted the
formation of the first trade unions and political parties: the People's
National party, formed by Norman Manley in 1938, and the Jamaican Labour
party, set up in 1943 by Manley's cousin Alexander Bustamente. The era
also produced a long list of radicals, preachers and visionaries in
Jamaica including Garvey and his contemporary Leonard Howell, who
founded the Rastafari religion in the early 1930s.
The rebel stance of Garvey and Howell had its roots in the slave trade.
The maroon leaders Cudjoe and Nanny the Baptist preachers Samuel Sharpe
and Paul Bogle fought and died for liberation from their British slave
masters and colonial rulers. They - alongside Garvey, Manley, Bustamente
and George William Gordon - are today honoured as the seven National
Heroes of Jamaica.
Rastafari Roots
The Rastafarian faith, with its core belief in the
righteousness of blackness, became the spiritual choice for many reggae
musicians in the 1970s. They were attracted to the reads' outsider rebel
stance, self-respect and poetic magic realism. Studio One's output
during this era stands proud and includes classic Rastafarian groups The
Gladiators, Wailing Souls and Burning Spear. However, some of the key
figures at Brentford Road in the 1960s also had a long-established
connection with the faith. They include The Skatalites, who pretty much
defined the music created during Studio One's first two years in
operation at Brentford Road (1963-1964) both with their own stunning ska
music and in creating the backing to all the singers and vocal groups
who entered the studio, including Alton Ellis, Ken Boothe, Toots & The
Maytals and The Wailers.
Most of The Skatalites, including Don Drummond, Lloyd Knibbs, Jah Jerry
and Johnny Moore were Rastafarian. Seeking spiritual communion and
musical exploration they (and sometimes Clement Dodd) would attend the
regular Rastafarian grounation drumming and reasoning sessions held at
master drummer Count Ossie's encampment in Wareika Hills, East Kingston
in the 1960s. Ossie's drummers in turn would on occasion come down to
perform live at many of Sir Coxsone's Downbeat Soundsystem dancehall
sessions.
For many years Rastafarians were thought of as outcasts and criminals,
living in an almost perpetual state of siege warfare with the police.
Their self-determination, non-conformist beliefs, righteous spirit and
wild, dreadlocks appearance were citied as evidence that they
represented a threat to mainstream society. In 1940 Leonard Howell, the
spiritual leader and founder of the Rastafarian movement, set up a
400-acre Pinnacle encampment for a community of his followers deep in
the hills of Sligoville, in the south-eastern district of St. Catherine,
10 miles north of Spanish Town. For almost 20 years up to 5000 dreads
live an agrarian and communal existence autonomous from the rest of
Jamaican society. However, repeated police raids took their toll on the
camp, which was decimated after a particularly vitriolic attack in 1954,
and finally abandoned in the early 1960s. The dreads dispersed from the
countryside to urban West Kingston, specifically to the poorest squatter
settlements of the Dungle and Back-O-Wall, creating makeshift homes from
zinc, board and the city's detritus.
Politricks
Since the 1970s, West Kingston and Trench Town have been
unstable and dangerous. The roots of the districts' problems date from
the early 1960s. After Jamaica's independence in 1962, Boston-born
Harvard-educated Edward Seaga became the elected political
representative for the Jamaican Labour party (JLP) for Western Kingston.
Seaga's early career had been in the music industry - he had formed the
West Indies Record Label (WIRL) in 1959 and soon had a hit with the
Trench Town singing duo (Joe) Higgs and (Roy) Wilson's 'Oh Manny Oh!'
After his election, Seaga was appointed Minister of Development and
Welfare by Alexander Bustamente, the first Prime Minister of Jamaica.
Seaga, as the minister responsible for planning, social development and
culture, shaped both the social environment from which reggae emerged
and the music's impact overseas.
One of Seaga and the JLP's first major social engineering enterprises
was redeveloping the notorious slum Back-O-Wall, which was pulled down
and replaced with new housing, schools and local amenities. The area was
renamed Tivoli Gardens and heralded by some as a model of community
development. But it had a detrimental impact on the Rastafarian
community, who, having migrated from the decimated Pinnacle settlement,
were again made homeless. Another consequence was the gerrymandering by
which the ghetto poor, who were often militant PNP voters, were moved
out and replaced by a relatively better-off new housing tenants.
Grateful for their new homes, they repaid the JLP by faithfully voting
for the political party in subsequent elections. Seaga was also rewarded
for his efforts - he held the Western Kingston seat for 43 years, (and
was Jamaica's Prime Minister from 1980 to 1989).
The gerrymandering process evolved violently and exponentially and
became known as 'garrisonisation' in the 1970s, when politicians of both
major parties (the JLP and PNP) enlisted the help of local thugs to
intimidate non-partisan voting residents out of an area, thus ensuring
the election of particular party leaders. Rewarded for their services
with money and weapons, these rude boys became thugs, and then gangsters
and gang members as their leaders became 'dons' - 'community figures'
who now ruled the area (alongside the elected politician) through
violence and intimidation. Dons eventually were able to jettison their
links with politicians after the power and money they received enabled
them to establish themselves as drug lords.
Seaga's role as head of Social Welfare and Economic Development also led
to him to organise a government-sponsored showcase of Jamaican music at
the 1964 New York World's Fair to promote island tourism. By all
accounts, The Skatalites were the hottest ska band on the island at the
time, but they were not invited. The artists who went included Jimmy
Cliff, Prince Buster, Millie Small and Eric 'Monty' Morris, backed by
the group Byron Lee & The Dragonaires. Seaga had earlier sold his record
company WIRL to Byron Lee (who renamed it Federal Records). Jimmy Cliff
commented: 'The singer were good, but Byron Lee's backing didn't work.
Seaga wanted uptown guys who looked good, but he should have had people
from the roots. It was probably a big factor that the Byron Lee band
didn't smoke ganja like all the other musicians'.
Cliff's reference to the rejection of The Skatalites' owing to their
Rastafarian practices was believed by the group themselves to be the
case, and this disappointment was a significant factor in the break-up
of the group shortly afterwards.
Mortimer Planno and the rise of the Rastafarian movement
Trench Town resident Mortimer Planno, a prominent Rastafari
teacher in Kingston since the 1950s, was among the first to realise the
political and social significance of the Rastafarian religion. Planno
helped found the Rastafari Movement Association and instigated the first
'Universal Grounation of the Rastafari', a drumming and chanting
ceremony held in Back-O-Wall in March 1958.
Planno realised that a more peaceful existence for the sect, free from
political interference and police harassment, would only come through a
better understanding and acceptance of Rastafari by mainstream society.
Planno convinced a group of anthropologists from the West Indies
University to commission an academic study of the Rastafari. The report,
the first of its kind, was published in 1960. It noted in its
introduction: 'The aim of this study is to present a brief account of
growth, doctrines, organisation, aspirations, needs and conditions of
the Ras Tafari movement in Jamaica, especially in Kingston, the
capital.' It concluded that the community of Rastafari was honest,
spiritual and not to be feared.
A year later Planno became part of a state-sponsored research group who
travelled to Africa. Here he met Haile Selassie, crowned king of
Ethiopia in 1930 and proclaimed by Howell and his followers to be the
living god for Rastafarians. this meeting with Rastafarian elders
eventually led to the visit of Selassie to Kingston in 1966. Daunted by
the site of thousands of Rastafarians at Palisadoes airport, only Planno
could coax His Majesty out of the airplane to greet the dreadlocked
faithful.
In the 1960s Planno's yard 35, on Fifth Street in Trench Town, was
situated near that of the Wailers: Bob Marley, Peter Tosh and Bunny
Wailer. It became a meeting point for spiritually interested musicians
to discuss Rastafari and study from Planno's extensive library of books
on Black Power and Ethiopian history. Regular visitors included Alton
Ellis, Ken Boothe and The Wailers. Planno became the spiritual advisor
to a number of reggae musicians, at one point even managing The Wailers
and recording a single by them: the Rastafarian 'Selassie is in the
Chapel'. Planno released the record, on which they were backed by the
nyabinghi drumming of Ras Michael and the Sons of Negus, on his own
label in 1968.
Walter Rodney and Black Power in the Caribbean
Black identity became central to the political landscape of
Jamaica in the late 1960s and early 1970. As the earlier Worlds' Fair
tour had shown, class, religion and race were powerful forces on the
island. Political activist Walter Rodney was born in British Guiana (now
Guyana) in 1942. He came to Jamaica in 1963 as a student at the
University College of West Indies, studying history. After studying in
London and Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania, he returned to Jamaica in 1968 as a
professor again at the University of West Indies.
Rodney had become a vocal advocate of socialism and had visited Cuba and
Russia. His radicalisation led him to attempt to bring together various
disenfranchised groups on the island - not only students and workers but
also the Rastafarians and even criminal gangs such as the Vikings. Many
of his speeches were published in a book, Grounding with my Brothers,
which became central to the Caribbean Black Power Movement. Rodney's
revolutionary ideas came under the scrutiny of the Jamaican government
and following a trip to the 1968 Black Writer's Conference in Montreal,
Canada, he was declared persona non grata and denied re-entry to
Jamaica, leading to widespread unrest in Kingston which became known as
the Rodney Riots.
In this period of intense social and political unrest, even the
university at which Rodney studied and worked (and the origin of the
earlier Rastafari report) was contested. In the eyes of the JLP, the
University of the West Indies was an outdated relic. It was a reminder
of the West Indies Federation, which was a failed political alliance of
the Caribbean islands, an attempt to create a 'Europe' of island states.
Manley and the PNP had been in favour of the confederation, but
Bustamente and the JLP had been against, forcing a referendum which led
to Jamaica leaving the Federation in 1961. After Jamaica achieved
Independence a year later, Bustamente became the first prime minister,
beating Manley. The Confederation was dissolved after Eric Williams, a
prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago, declared that 10 (island member
countries of the Confederation) minus one (ie Jamaica) equals zero.
Joshua and the Rod of Correction
In 1969, a young and charismatic Michael Manley was elected
leader of the opposition People's National party, following the
retirement of his father Norman Manley. He had seen a political opening
in the government's rejection of black power, which had alienated many
voters. That year he travelled to Ethiopia and returned with a walking
stick that he said had been given to him by Haile Selassie.
By the 1972 general election, this stick had become 'the Rod of
Correction', used by Manley as a prop at his public speeches. He likened
himself to Joshua, the one who would lead the people into the Promised
Land. Manley appealed to the 'sufferahs', the unemployed, the outcasts
of Jamaican society. He peppered his speeches with Rastafarian language
and imagery. He cultivated support from reggae artists such as Bob
Marley, while Delroy Wilson's 'Better Must Come' became the slogan and
soundtrack to his campaign. Manley won the general election with a
massive landslide.
Trench Town in the 1970s
Trench Town became dangerous in the early 1970s as both the JLP
and PNP violently enforced a code that ensured only their party's
supporters had access to jobs and services. The southern part of Trench
Town became JLP territory, while the northern part, known as Arnette
Gardens ('Jungle'), was a PNP stronghold. The road connecting the two,
Seventh Street, became the frontline in an all-out war.
The violence in West Kingston, Trench Town, Wilton Gardens, Arnette
Gardens and Denham Town continued into the 1990s. Tivoli Gardens was the
scene of repeated clashes between gunmen and security forces in the 21st
Century. In one of these battles in 2010, JLP strongman and 'Don' drug
lord Christopher 'Dudus' Coke, head of the Shower Posse gang who had
ruled over Tivoli Gardens since the 1980s was finally captured, and
extradited to the United States on drug charges.
Black Pride
This collection illustrates how black pride remained a central
theme, perhaps the defining essence, of the music created at 13
Brentford Road. So while this album includes a number of clearly defined
Rastafarian groups (The Gladiators, Wailing Souls), black consciousness
runs throughout, whether in praise of the Lion of Judah or not.
Reggae music and the Rastafari movement were born from the same harsh
socio-economic and political realities associated with everyday life in
the ghettos of West Kingston. They are inseparable from each other. This
partly explains the appeal of Rastafari to many reggae artists during
the decades of the 1970s and 1980s. Many of the songs featured here come
from the transitory phase in reggae at the start of the 1970s, after the
exhilaration of ska and the cooling down of rock steady. While roots
reggae was about to dominate Jamaican music and spread throughout the
world, Studio One's vocalists were already producing some of the
moodiest and most righteous music imaginable.
S. Baker |