“Reggae Bloodlines”: Sample Definition Essay
From REGGAE BLOODLINES:
In Search of the Music
and Culture of JamaicaText by Stephen Davis
Photos by Peter Simon
Da Capo Press, 1992
From the beginning, Jamaica was never really a colonial settlement. From the middle of the seventeenth century the island was used more as a huge agricultural factory by a handful of British planters who reaped astronomical fortunes from sugar plantations worked by slaves imported from the Gold Coast of Africa. During the 250-year period that slavery was active in Jamaica some thirty million Africans were brought to the New World—the largest forced migration in human history. Among the thousands shipped to Jamaica were Ibos from lower Niger, Coromantee, Hausa, and Mandingo peoples from the Gold and Ivory Coasts, as well as people of the Noko, Yoruba, Sobo, and Nago nations. Jamaica's aboriginal Arawak Indians had almost all been killed by the Spaniards (who preceded the British) or had died from their diseases, leaving no mark upon their land but their name for it—Xaymaca, Land of Springs.
The roots of Reggae music are fixed in slavery. Slave orchestras were formed by several of the richer planters and entertained at such slave holidays as End of Crop Time, Piccaninny Christmas, Recreation Time, and the Grandee Balls. Rhythms, songs, and dances that are purely African have survived in rural Jamaica well into the twentieth century. A 1924 study of possible survivals of African song in Jamaica identifies African-derived work songs and grave songs in Western Jamaica's Cockpit Country as featuring part singing, antiphonal call-response chanting, and the repetition of single short musical phrases—all of which are characteristic of reggae. Among the Cockpit Maroon tribes—descendants of runaway slaves who fought the British to a draw a hundred years before Jamaican abolition and treatied themselves into an autonomous nation that still exists—the researchers of the 1924 study collected songs (called Coromantee songs by the Maroons) that speak of venerable Arican story figures—Anansi the spider and Jesta the trickster. Christmas time in Jamaica today is still celebrated by companies of John Canoe (or Junkanoo) dancers dressed in flashy rags, feathered headdresses, and black masks with features outlined in Ghastlywhite. The dancers parade through the country towns, shouting and juking to African polyrhythm and the piping of the cane flutes. No one is sure what the John Canoe dance is all about save the obvious display of magic and spirit power, but the name has been traced to dzong kunu, "terrible sorcerer" in the West African Ewe tongue. With their music the slaves brought their spirits and fetishes. The cuminadance is still practiced throughout the island as a curative; black and white magic is practiced by obeahmen and "science ladies" (Is your neighbor old Rupert killing your chocho vines with his cross-eyed stare? Have Mother Billeh fix up a powder and drop it into his ganja tea and either his eyes uncross or him drop dead. And then you have to go back to Mother Billeh to conquer Rupert's duppy—his ghost that's crawling into bed with you every night and wilting the bananas...). The various Afro-Caribbean fundamentalist cults that sprang up in Jamaica are also African in origin, especially the Pocomania ("Little Madness") churches that survive in Kingston and Montego Bay with their stark polytheism, syncopated druming, and shuffling, breathy Pocomaniac trance: wuh-huh, wuh-huh, wuh-huh, wuh-huh, wuh-huh,wuh-huh....
Slavery was finally abolished in Jamaica in 1838, but the institution left a mark on the Jamaican descendants of African slaves that forms what ideological base reggae has. One of Jamaica's most popular reggae groups, Burning Spear, has a stinging, mesmerizing chant that is both rhetorical question and finger-pointing admonition: Do you remember the days of slavery? Do you remember the days of slavery? And in "Slave Driver," one of the Wailers' early numbers, Bob Marley eerily re-creates the anguish of a human chattel to the scratch of a harrowing reggae guitar chop:
When I remember the crack of the whip
My blood runs cold
I remember on the slave ship
When they brutalized my very soul.Reggae is Jamaican soul music, a sort of tropic rock and roll with accents on the second and fourth beats, a metric system so flamboyant and unique that only seasoned Jamaican drummers can keep it together and flowing. Reggae has been around for years now, but many of the finest rock and jazz drummers in the world have been unable to master reggae time, and not for lack of trying.
Until the early Fifties, Jamaican music consisted only of mento, a depoliticized relation of the riotous calypso of Trinidad. Mento is also Jamaican adaptations of old British folk songs and sea chanteys. But where calypso is an exact science, a sophisticated vehicle for social comment, mento was often crude and dirty, so lewd, in fact, that the church in Jamaica kept some of the best mento recordings from being sold except under the counter. Jamaicans were content with mento until the early Fifties, when the island began to industrialize and change from an agro-oriented culture to an increasingly urbanized society. Kingston and the larger towns began to fill up, and a new Jamaican—the bauxite worker, the factory hand, the longshoreman—left the rural parishes for the opportunities of the city.
Right behind industrialization comes the awesome force of the transistor radio, but modern Jamaicans had been carefully monitoring Rhythm and Blues broadcasts from the States, most notably the AM stations roaring out of Miami and New Orleans when the nights were clear and the prevailing winds just right to float the sounds of Fats Domino, Amos Milburn, and the Louis Jordan bands right in for a landing in Jamaica, where the music was scrutinized, analyzed, taken apart, translated, assimilated, joked about, and put together again. New Orleans R&B literally came off the boat; the Crescent City was and is the major export of things American to Kingston. But when it arrived, R&B was usually speeded up by local musicians who grew up with the slightly scattered pace of mento. As time progressed American R&B and soul music became the predominant music of the Caribbean, and in Jamaica particularly rapt attention was paid to anything new by Otis Redding, Sam Cooke (whose gospel voicings Jamaicans identified specially with), James Brown, Solomon Burke, Ben E. King, Chris Kenner, Lee Dorsey, and Brook Benton, whom Bob Marley names as one of his principal favorites.
With the rise of R&B in Jamaica came the legendary "sound systems." Jamaican radio is government-controlled and was then too conservative for the steady diet of black blues that ordinary Jamaicans wanted to hear. Good R&B records were hard to come by and too expensive for most Jamaicans even when they were available, so a new entrepreneur entered the scene: the "sound-system man." More often than not, the sound systems were extensions of record shops, whose owner borrowed a van and loaded it with the biggest speakers he could find, a couple of turntables, and a stack of new sides just off the plane from New Orleans or Miami, and set up in somebody's back yard or out in a country market on a Saturday night. In the early Sixties competition among the various traveling discos got really intense.
Pioneers like Duke Reid, Sir Coxsone Dodd, and Prince Buster (they and countless imitators and pretenders invariably assumed titles of royalty—King Tubby is the penultimate) would scratch out the label of a hot new record so the competition would take longer to pick up on the song. Sound systems had vociferous followings whose collective ardor in support of the favorite disc jockey would send the claques of La Scala back to the woodwork in shame. When systems like Coxsone's and Prince Buster's would set up within hearing distance of each other in the early days, squads of police usually were called in to control the resultant punch-outs.
Around 1960 the major R&B and pop music movements in America fizzled and died. Nobody knows why. It just happened. In Jamaica the sound systems were dependent for their livelihood on instantly accessible hit records that people could dance to. That kind of music never stopped coming in from New Orleans, but arrived in sufficient quantity only to keep a couple of systems alive and growing musically. Jamaicans couldn't and didn't identify with songs like "Palisades Park."
The slump in American music led directly to the beginnings of reggae. Frustrated by the lack of music coming in from the States, the sound-system men were forced to turn to local Jamaican music. This may not seem like a big deal until one realizes that, when it achieved its independence from Britain in 1962, Jamaica inherited a depressed colonial mentality and a gigantic national inferiority complex right out of Frantz Fanon's theories and 250 years of slavery. To educated Jamaicans anything British, American, or Canadian was vastly superior to anything home-grown. (Self-contempt has proven the greatest and most psychically expensive barrier for the Third World to transcend, and Jamaica is the example of this rather than the exception.) So when the sound-system men had to turn to Jamaican musicians to churn out an electric dance music for the brothers and sisters to get down and skank to, they were turning against history and fortune. Sound-system men styled themselves record producers, rented a little time at some ridiculous tinny two-track studio in Kingston—maybe Randy's on the North Parade—and found some country boy just in from Blue Hole or Alligator Pond and starving in the streets like Ivan O. Martin or Jimmy Cliff or Desmond Dekker—some nascent rude boy who learned to sing in church or school and was hungry and wolfish enough to compose a song about it—and they made records. The music was vibrant and loping; the dancers at the sound systems made up a dance to it and called the dance ska, and in time that became the name for Jamaican R&B Ska. Cheerful, riddled with funky brass sections, disorganized, almost random. Ska was mento, Stateside R&B, and Jamaicans coming to terms with electric guitars and amplification. The sound systems became even more popular, and to get a bigger boom outdoors the deejays discovered all they had to do to both satisfy and stun their audiences was to turn the bass knobs all the way up to the pain threshold. Today the bass-driven mojo of the best reggae is derived precisely from the need of recorded music loud outdoors.
Ska music stayed in Kingston and the West Indian ghettos of East London until 1964, when a then fledgling white Jamaican producer named Chris Blackwell recorded a ska tune, "My Boy Lollipop," by a singer named Millie Small, and released it in England, where it was the first West Indian record to make number on the British charts. The tune also did well in Europe and was a respectable hit in the States. Jamaican music had been presented to the world for the first time and seemed to have passed the test. Wrongfully anticipating a planetary ska craze after Small's hit, dozens of Jamaican musicians and British-based black bands had a go at ska singles. Some of the minor hits of the period were "Darling Patricia," by Owen Gray; "Miss Jamaica," by the fifteen-year-old Jimmy Cliff; "Rough and Tough;" by Derrick Morgan; and "Jamaica Ska," by Byron Lee and the Ska Kings. Sound-system-man-turned-producer Prince Buster churned out forgettable but qualitatively good ska singles that kept the music barely respectable as it became more pallid and faceless with each modification.
No one can really identify the point at which the Jamaican dance music called ska evolved into and was ultimately replaced by a new dance called "rock-steady." The prevailing theory is that the bitterly hot and dry summer of 1966 retarded the bouncy tempo of the ska dancers and necessitated what one observer has called a "slow, painful, almost sinister" dance-rock-steady. By the mid-Sixties the sound-system men were devoting all their energy to recording singles, hustling them at home, promoting them in England, and as usual robbing the singers to their socks. Too busy to attend to their mobile discos, they hired disc jockeys to run them, and the best of these later would become major stars and cult figures in their own right. With the influx of British cash, the producers improved their techniques and equipment. Fewer instruments were required to produce the basic rock-steady sound; rhythm and bass guitars, drums, and organ became the typical instrumental lineup. An occasional horn section might be thrown in to record. The music was called rock-steady very aptly; as a dance beat it was steadier and more dependable than the vagaries of ska. The sound was more substantial and carried more internal meaning than the airiness of the best of ska. Lyrical content exposed the consciousness of the artist for the first time. No longer were songs exclusively about love and making love, the preoccupations of ska; a rock-steady tune might deal with the police, hungry children, or even the disc jockey U Roy's astounding evocation of Dubcek and the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia in his version of "Listen to the Teacher." The big rock-steady hit outside of Jamaica was Max Romeo's lewd "Wet Dream" (second verse: "Look how you big and fat, like a big, big shot, give the crumpet to big foot Joe, give the fanny to me..."), which is said to have sold a million copies in England in 1967 without having gone on the charts. Max claimed later the song was about a leaky roof.
The dance that replaced rock-steady, around 1968, was called "reggae." Again, no one knows for certain where that word comes from. Some trace it to the Jamaican dialect word for raggedness. The word appears first on a 1967 dance record by the Maytals called "Do the Reggay." I once asked Toots Hibbert, lead singer of the Maytals and composer of "Do the Reggay," to tell me what the word meant, and his answer is as satisfactory a definition of reggae as you're likely to get: "Reggae means comin' from the people, y'know? Like a everyday thing. Like from the ghetto. From majority. Everyday thing that people use like food, we just put music to it and make a dance out of it. reggae mean regular people who are suffering, and don't have what they want." The reggae sound was even slightly slower than rock-steady and much more powerful due to the emphasis of the bass and the principal melodic drive of most songs. Social, political, and spiritual concepts entered the lyrics more and more, until the reggae musicians became Jamaica's prophets, social commentators, and shamans.
This review was first published on the Website of Easy Star Records and is used here with their gracious permission.