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Jamaica

Kingston, Black Ark, 1973

Lee "Scratch" Perry

Rainford "Lee Scratch" Perry built Black Ark studio behind his own Kingston home in 1973 and made it one of the strangest and most productive rooms in reggae. He piled up tape hiss, backwards drums and echo until a song seemed to write itself. He had already helped shape Bob Marley and the Wailers' early sound before going his own way with his house band, the Upsetters. The studio ended in a fire. By his own account he set it on purpose, though even his family has told the story differently over the years. Perry died in 2021, still touring and still telling it his way.

"The Godfather of Rocksteady"

Alton Ellis

Alton Ellis started out at Coxsone Dodd's Studio One before becoming the main voice of Duke Reid's Treasure Isle. Jamaican music history credits him with naming a whole genre in the mid-1960s, when ska slowed down into something warmer called rocksteady. His rhythms from those years carried well beyond Jamaica, as far as the Staple Singers. His career earned him the nickname "the Godfather of Rocksteady" and, in 2004, Jamaica's Order of Distinction.

Kingston, recording at fourteen

Hugh Mundell

Hugh Mundell was barely into his teens when he met producer and melodica player Augustus Pablo at Joe Gibbs' studio and started recording. His first sessions were at Lee Perry's Black Ark in 1976, when he was fourteen. Pablo produced all of Africa Must Be Free by 1983, an album Mundell had written entirely himself by sixteen, though it didn't come out until the year in its title. He never saw the release. In October 1983, at twenty-one, he was shot and killed in his car in Kingston. Junior Reid, a fellow singer riding with him, survived. The shooter was convicted two years later.

Waterhouse, Kingston, a short career

Lacksley Castell

Lacksley Castell grew up in Kingston's Waterhouse district. His career lasted barely five years, and he packed it with sessions for Augustus Pablo, Lee Perry and Prince Jammy, plus a close friendship with fellow singer Hugh Mundell and a 1980 album with him, Jah Fire. His own best-remembered record, Morning Glory, came out in 1982 on the Negus Roots label, and its dub versions showed up the same year on Sly and Robbie's Dub Rockers Delight. He died of an illness in November 1983, at twenty-four. That same year Mundell, his friend and labelmate, was killed by violence.

Soulettes singer, then solo

Nora Dean

Nora Dean sang lead in two different vocal groups, the Soulettes, alongside Rita Marley, and later the Soul Sisters. Then came a solo career that took her through sessions for Duke Reid, Lee Perry, Sonia Pottinger and Harry Mudie. She also sang backing vocals on Jimmy Cliff's 1973 album Unlimited. Like a lot of singers of the era, she made a working career out of sessions for whichever producer's studio she walked into that week.

From Studio One to Massive Attack

Horace Andy

Horace Hinds became Horace Andy at Studio One, where producer Coxsone Dodd needed some way to tell him apart from his cousin, singer Justin Hinds. His high tenor, with plenty of vibrato in it, topped the Jamaican charts in 1972 and carried 1982's Dance Hall Style into the roots-reggae canon. In 1990 it found a whole new audience when Massive Attack brought him in as a guest vocalist. He has sung on every album the group has made since, reworking some of his own older material along the way. Nobody in Kingston's rocksteady clubs would have guessed that voice would end up at the center of 1990s trip-hop.

A melodica borrowed at school

Augustus Pablo

Horace Swaby borrowed a melodica from a classmate at Kingston College and turned what was basically a toy reed instrument into a lead voice in reggae. Recording as Augustus Pablo, he worked with engineer King Tubby to build the mournful, echo-heavy "Far East" sound that helped make dub a genre of its own. Pablo died in 1999, at forty-five, from complications of a long illness. By then the melodica he'd once borrowed had become a fixture of reggae's sound.

The Collection