How Jamaica’s 1950s DJs Gave Rise to Their Counterparts on the Disco and Hip-Hop Scenes

In Jamaica during the 1950s, people began to gather in parks and on beaches, partying to music that was spun by entrepreneurial disc jockeys and piped through outdoor loudspeakers. This quirk of economics, geography, and technology would not only vibrate across the island but, by the 1970s and ’80s, across the planet.

At the time, the British Colonial Office was trying to force the island into independence as part of what was called a “West Indies federation.” Jamaica, however, was different. Twelve hundred miles west of the other British islands, and larger and more populous than Trinidad, Jamaica had a longer and more brutal history, and, lacking Trinidad’s oil wells, was much poorer.

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A decade before, Jamaica’s search for an economic engine had settled on bauxite, the raw material from which aluminum is forged. There was plenty of this high-grade dirt near the island’s surface, but not enough electricity on Jamaica to power a refinery, so raw bauxite was cheaply exported to be forged profitably into metal in British and Canadian mills. Digging up the earth also destroyed great stretches of tillable soil, driving displaced Jamaican farmers to Kingston to look for work. The result was a certain amount of wealth for an elite and ever-increasing poverty for the rest.

The bauxite effect combined with 1951’s Hurricane Charlie to change the face of Kingston. As the middle class moved out to the suburbs, the government rebuilt the devastated city by constructing “yards,” where many families were housed around a central court. Another initiative by the colonial administration was to grant “rediffusion” licenses to broadcasters, allowing private companies to place loudspeakers in town squares and government yards, relaying a steady stream of bland music, news, talk, and advertising across the island.

Jamaicans took to the technology but preferred choosing their own music. Radio ownership boomed and the island’s location at the western end of the Caribbean made it easy to tune in US “clear channel” stations after dark. The poor state of the economy also drove many to look for seasonal work in Florida; travel and radio combined to broaden Jamaicans’ musical horizons. If there had once been a superficial congruence between the tuneful, French- and Spanish-inflected music of Trinidad and that of Jamaica, the steady flow of rhythm and blues and jazz over radio waves, and in the grooves of 78s and 45s, turned Jamaica in a different direction.

Those “rediffusion broadcasts” sparked an idea that transformed Jamaican music. As the left-behind poor established themselves across much of central Kingston, the notion of blasting the sorts of music heard on US radio—Wynonie Harris, Jimmy Reed, Billy Eckstine, Louis Jordan, Fats Domino, Johnny Ace, and the like—over loudspeakers in open spaces known as “lawns” resulted in a “sound system” boom.

Descriptions of these 1950s Kingston dances invoke the scent of bougainvillea mixing with ganja smoke under the moon while a DJ gauged the balance between energy and romance in his choice of discs. As the evening progressed, he would move from the wild to the smooth as boys began holding girls closer, “greasin’ da crease” to a Jesse Belvin ballad. “It seem like to be a teenager in Jamaica during that era,” the singer and record producer Derrick Harriott would later recall, “was the best thing on earth.”

Kingston dances invoke the scent of bougainvillea mixing with ganja smoke under the moon while a DJ gauged the balance between energy and romance in his choice of discs.

As Lloyd Bradley puts it in Bass Culture, the sound systems served as “a lively dating agency, a fashion show, an information exchange, a street status parade ground, a political forum [and] a centre of commerce,” while also providing a community bulletin board, with DJs announcing who was out of jail or back from England. These were family affairs; some remember dancing as teenagers with their grandparents while stalls dished up curried goat, callaloo and salt fish, fruit juice and beer. Under the noses of the authorities, a vividly Black urban culture was emerging on an island whose self-image had been dominated by whites and light-skinned Blacks and their very different vision of what Jamaica was supposed to look like as it moved towards independence.

Two factors dominated the competition between rival sound-system operators: volume and exclusivity. An early sign of the sonic wizardry that would later distinguish Jamaican record production was how Kingston sound mavens would wire higher and higher stacks of speakers to ever-more-powerful amplifiers, with the combined objective of giving patrons a visceral bass-heavy experience while drowning out smaller fry nearby. Dancers voted with their feet for systems that played great records they couldn’t hear on the radio; by scratching off the labels, disc jockeys tried to keep competitors from discovering the artists and titles of tracks that got crowds moving. Seasonal workers often headed to Florida with shopping lists and could seriously augment their fruit-harvesting wages if they came back with a suitcase full of coveted discs. Visiting American sailors would barter records for cigars, rum, ganja, and women.

With Jamaican nights so hot and humid, high-energy rock ’n’ rollers like Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis were never much of a factor; islanders preferred the late-’40s/early-’50s jump blues that blurred the line between rhythm and blues and jazz, especially those coming from New Orleans or Memphis. “Bloodshot Eyes” by Wynonie Harris and “Later for the Gator,” an instrumental by Willis “Gator Tail” Jackson, endured as totemic platters across the decade. When Jamaica began making its own records, sound-system tastes would be the guide.

An entrepreneur who generates stacks of cash in a poor neighborhood will require toughness and muscle to survive. Another truism is that for any music venue, alcohol is the key profit center. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that the giant among early sound-system operators was an ex-cop who owned a liquor store. Arthur Reid had been a corrupt and widely hated police sergeant; when his wife won the lottery, he retired from the force and opened Treasure Isle Liquors. The Reids sponsored the first rhythm and blues show on Jamaican radio, and the reaction was so enthusiastic that Arthur moved easily into running a sound system.

“Duke” Reid would arrive wearing ten gold rings and a crown, with a bandolier of bullets across his chest, firing a shotgun into the air and sometimes juggling a hand grenade.

Styling himself “Duke,” Reid would arrive wearing ten gold rings and a crown, with a bandolier of bullets across his chest, firing a shotgun into the air and sometimes juggling a hand grenade. His henchmen were known to smash rivals’ speakers and turntables and threaten their patrons; it could be said that Duke Reid’s with-me-or-against-me tactics, as they spilled over into post-Independence politics, established a violent pattern that poisons Kingston to this day. He did, however, have good musical taste and the cash to ensure a steady supply of the latest American records.

Clement Dodd’s parents also ran a liquor store and were friends with Reid’s wife. The young jazz buff took a few turns spinning discs at Duke’s shows and earned some money bringing records and sound equipment back from Florida. Once he had amassed his own stack of tracks, Dodd became Reid’s biggest rival, using a nickname derived from youthful cricketing exploits: “Sir Coxsone.” His friend Blackie would invent dance steps and the two of them drew cheering crowds demonstrating moves that were emulated across Kingston.

Needing enforcers to protect his shows from Reid, Coxsone hired a young thug named Buster Campbell, who turned out to have extraordinarily sharp ears; eavesdropping on other systems, Buster could identify artists and often figure out the titles of their “secret weapon” 45s and 78s. Dodd later added another sidekick, Lee Perry, to run satellite systems for him out at the beaches.

As white American teenagers jumped on the rhythm and blues bandwagon in the mid-’50s, transforming it into rock ’n’ roll, crowd-pleasing discs grew harder to find. The time had come for Jamaicans to make their own. Duke Reid, Coxsone Dodd, “Prince” Buster Campbell, and Lee “Scratch” Perry all became pioneering record producers, laying the cornerstones for a style of music with which this small island would conquer the world.

Jamaicans trying to replicate American R & B created something new. First ska (Millie’s “My Boy Lollipop,” for one), then the rock-steady epitomized by the Harder They Come soundtrack—“By the Rivers of Babylon,” Jimmy Cliff, Toots and the Maytals, Desmond Dekker—and culminating in the reggae that the genius of Bob Marley and the Wailers gave the world, the indelible music emerging from this “island in the sun.” The world may have loved it, but back home, battered by poverty and political violence, Jamaicans were demanding a different soundtrack. By the mid-’70s, DJs once again ruled Kingston.

Osbourne Ruddock was a Jamaican “techie,” a nerd; he loved tinkering with gadgets, building radio sets and amplifiers. Setting up a repair shop in Kingston, he was quickly in demand to fix sound-system equipment, then, later, studio gear. Exposure to the music scene drew him in and he began developing his own ideas, eventually building his own sound system with great speakers and the highest-quality amps. Audiences clearly loved DJs messing with a disc, repeating a verse, talking and rhyming over the “Version” side, singing a song their own way, stopping or starting in the middle of a track. Not being much of a “toaster” (translation: proto-rap in which a DJ talks or rhymes over a rhythm), Ruddock would keep crowds entertained by twirling his EQ dials, ramping up the bass until its booming drowned out the vocal, then the other way around, making the singer piercing and thin, with great whooshes of sound as he swung the dials from one end of the spectrum to the other, throwing in a heavy repeat echo at just the right moment. Drawing on his live experience, he built new equipment and modified old gadgets, tailoring them to the kind of sounds Jamaicans loved. He needed a stage name to suit his burgeoning career; his mother’s family were called Tubman, so slim, trim Osbourne Ruddock became King Tubby.

When he started cutting masters for Duke Reid, he would fill the order, then start fooling around, creating soft-wax acetates with the master tapes, slapping on reverb for a few bars, dropping out the instruments and leaving the singers on their own or vice versa—and doing it all in real time, straight to disc. Sound-system crowds loved the resulting exclusives. Other producers began stopping by Tubby’s house, where the front room had become a pirate’s den of effects and gadgets; together, they explored a new sound they called “dub.”

The producer most intrigued by these developments, naturally, was Lee “Scratch” Perry. He began recording vocals and mixing at Tubby’s place, which inspired him to build his own studio, the Black Ark. The two pioneers made quite a contrast: Scratch worked standing up and barefoot, dressed in whatever he threw on when he got out of bed that morning, spliff always in hand, while Tubby was a short-back-and-sides man who dressed like a stylish accountant and polished his dials and faders until they gleamed. Blackboard Jungle Dub, generally considered the genre’s first great LP, was produced by Scratch and mixed by Tubby.

Dub worked better with toasting than with singing. Volumes could be written about the African origins of rhythmic talking, or speech delivered over percussion, with a side journey to the Black commandeurs or “callers” who ruled 18-century quadrille dances in the French and Spanish Caribbean. Jamaicans credit the island’s particular style to the ’50s sound-system host Count Machuki, a keen student of the way US rhythm-and-blues disc jockeys would hand out a line of jive over instrumental intros and interject between verses. Machuki didn’t use “Version” simply as a bed to talk over, he bounced in and out of the rhythm, dancing across the beats with jokes and wordplay. Toasting took a leap forward when King Tubby started making dub plates for U-Roy, a DJ working at his sound system. Tubby would spin a well-known hit, then segue to his own twisted dub version as U-Roy made his entrance with a torrent of patwa (dialect) and the crowd going wild.

For years, dub and toasting were considered strictly live phenomena. Labels couldn’t imagine record buyers listening over and over to such a transitory event. But the labels were wrong. Mid-’70s Kingston was ready for a change and dub suited the mood. Like Marley and Cliff, most of the top singers and musicians now had international recording contracts and touring agents and were often away “in foreign”; violence had rendered live music almost impossible in Kingston, so they had little incentive to stay at home. Political change had arrived, too, with Seaga and the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) losing the 1972 election to Michael Manley’s People’s National Party (PNP). Manley, almost as light-skinned as Seaga, campaigned wielding a “rod of correction” while Delroy Wilson’s “Better Must Come” blared from PNP campaign trucks.

Manley’s early years promised much, with the economy improving and the government showing a commitment to helping the poorest. But when he tried gathering the mostly poor and undeveloped bauxite-producing countries into an OPEC-style cartel to push up prices, Alcoa and Reynolds simply shrugged and began digging up Australia and Brazil instead. Jamaica’s economy cratered as a crackdown on ganja exports removed the one remaining financial lifeline. When the PNP tried to stabilize the currency by outlawing the use of US dollars, dealers began swapping herb for guns, ratcheting up the level of violence on the island even further. Things got worse during the petrol crisis of 1974; when Manley opened an embassy in Havana and had his picture taken with Castro, the US cut off financial aid and the CIA began a violent campaign to run the PNP out of office, funneling guns and money to JLP-linked gangs. As far as most Rastas were concerned, it was all “politricks” as usual in Babylon.

What was the appropriate soundtrack for such events? Certainly not cheery melodic songs. Even before Scratch and Tubby brought mixing boards and special effects front and center, reggae’s sonic atmosphere had grown steadily darker. Now, booming bass lines and repetitive drum patterns, interrupted by parts of the track dropping out, replaced by ghostly echoes and repeats, sounded even more ominous. Eighteenth-century planters had found their slaves’ drums and chants mysterious and menacing, which was pretty much how the Jamaican ruling class now felt about the sounds emerging from the slums. The hairstyle wasn’t called “dread” locks for nothing.

The word dub is, on one level, a straightforward term for an audio copy, dubbing from one medium (tape) onto another (disc). But the term also resonates with the Jamaican word for “ghost”—“duppy”—and how dissolving images of the original vocal or bass line appear as “spirits” of their original selves in a miasma of echoes and effects. It also didn’t hurt that dub had become rude-boy slang for sex, referencing the dropping of the stylus onto virgin shellac. Sound systems, at least those that weren’t shut by violence, flourished and DJs became stars.

Where did the idea of holding a dance and not booking any musicians originate? Jamaica, obviously; with no ballrooms or nightclubs to speak of, the island’s bands performed mostly at tourist resorts or in the studio. Thanks to DJs, though, there was dancing in Kingston every night.

But that’s the wrong answer.

In Nazi Germany in the late 1930s, musicians caught playing “obscene Jewish jungle music” could end up in a concentration camp; “swing kids,” the Reich’s youthful dissidents, knew that only thick walls, heavy curtains, absolute secrecy, and someone’s jazz 78s played at modest volume, could allow them a few precious hours of jitterbugging. This practice seems to have been stowed away in the Wehrmacht’s baggage on the march to Paris, where references to discothèques pop up in accounts of Left Bank life both during the Occupation and in those storied years following Liberation. What could possibly be hipper than a nexus where Juliette Gréco and Jean-Paul Sartre meet Prince Buster and Scratch Perry?

What could possibly be hipper than a nexus where Juliette Gréco and Jean-Paul Sartre meet Prince Buster and Scratch Perry?

With louder PA systems, the practice of dancing to records began to spread, and it was the French model that dominated: fashionable “discos,” velvet ropes, guest lists, and DJs whose skill lay in choosing records in a sequence that determined the mood of the night. But today’s vast expanses of dancers in warehouses and fields owe far more to the “lawns” of Kingston than the A-Go-Gos of Paris; celebrity DJs such as David Guetta playing exclusive remixes (and earning many times more than the musicians they sample) fall in a direct line from gold-crowned Duke Reid firing his shotguns into the Jamaican night.

The notion of disc jockey as royalty gathered strength as another group of outcasts joined Germany’s swing kids and Jamaica’s urban underclass in particularizing their dancing experience. In the remote dunes of Fire Island in the early ’70s, New York’s gay dance scene honed the art of the mixtape. Tom Moulton was a pioneer who edited tracks together and looped the best bits using a pair of scissors and Scotch tape. He seems to have been unaware of the existence of Kingston “selectors,” but by the end of the decade, New York’s most famous downtown DJs were pronouncing Scratch’s and Tubby’s names with awed reverence and applying lessons learned from them in constructing their 12-inch remixes.

There would seem to be a conceptual link between Kingston’s promiscuous use and reuse of tracks and the postmodern, context-free appropriation of music from across the globe by the innovative kingpins of the gay dance scene. Rhythms remained the biggest difference between the two worlds; the tropical isle’s fascination with ever more inventive and complex beats was very far from the jackhammer, four-on-the-floor pulse that provided a perfect accompaniment to the anonymous sex of the pre-AIDS ’70s on those northern islands, Manhattan and Fire.

Meanwhile, about ten miles north of the Meatpacking District, on that southward-jutting peninsula of the US mainland known as the Bronx, something far more portentous was taking place.

The sun hadn’t gone down yet, and kids were just hanging out, waiting for something to happen. Van pulls up, a bunch of guys come out with a table, crates of records. They unscrew the base of the light pole, take their equipment, attach it to that, get the electricity—Boom! We got a concert right here in the schoolyard and it’s this guy Kool Herc. And he’s just standing with the turntable, and the guys were studying his hands. There are people dancing, but there’s as many people standing, just watching what he’s doing. That was my first introduction to in-the-street, hip-hop DJing.
—Nelson George

Kool Herc was born Clive Campbell (no relation to Buster) in Kingston; he emigrated to New York as a kid in 1967, but not before experiencing sound systems. As a Bronx teenager in the early ’70s, he hosted after-school parties in the recreation room of the building where his family lived at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue. This anonymous “project” tower is identical to hundreds of others, but New York State has designated it as a “site of historic interest”—the spot where hip-hop was born.

Spinning records for his friends, Campbell (nicknamed Hercules on the basketball court for his height and strength) noticed how they loved the drum breaks on old James Brown records. Borrowing an idea from King Tubby, he linked two turntables so he could jump from the end of a break on one copy to the start of it on another, effectively looping Brown’s drum fills. Another trick that arrived in Herc’s carry-on bag from Jamaica was to toast over those breaks. His classmates had never heard anything like it and soon his parties were overflowing the small indoor space and he had to move them to nearby basketball courts and playgrounds.

Two among those Nelson George describes watching Herc’s hands were Joseph Saddler and Lance Taylor, children of Barbadian immigrant families and later known as Grandmaster Flash and Afrika Bambaataa. Despite the pilfered electricity and the booming sound from his ever-bigger speakers, police tolerated Herc’s dance parties since they kept kids in one place and had a dampening effect on crime. During the first half of the ’70s, the Bronx had been wracked by gang wars, arson, and random shootings; the second half of the decade was peaceful in comparison, largely due to the craze for spinning records, “scratching” back and forth between turntables, the break-dancing Herc encouraged with contests and prizes, and the toasting (which Yanks called “rapping”).

Jamaican sound systems as the prototype for a Bronx musical revolution didn’t end there. Herc also taught his friends about dub plates; rap’s multibillion-dollar recording industry began, like ska and dub, with enterprising DJs cutting tracks, rhyming over them, and, eventually, pressing and releasing them, raps included. By the time “Rapper’s Delight” and “The Message” arrived at the end of the decade, Herc was out of the spotlight, working in a record store, battered by violent jealousies, casual arson, and younger DJs with more advanced techniques.

In Jamaica, meanwhile, the record business began to resemble medieval African kingdoms where musicians, like griots, toiled in the service of “big men” who rewarded praise songs that glorified their exploits; Kingston dance tracks were now mostly crafted on computers, financed by drug dealers and tailored to please them.

Ragga and dancehall finally succeeded in cutting Jamaican music off from all but its own diaspora. Some tracks by Buju Banton, Shabba Ranks, and Shaggy did break through with hip-hop audiences in America, while influence, along with the drug trade, continued to flow back and forth, with each culture seemingly egging the other on to become more hard-edged, violent, misogynist, and homophobic, driven by feuds and revenge. At the close of every dance, however, it remains customary to play a Bob Marley track; in an instant, the mood shifts, becoming nostalgic, even gentle, with many in the crowd, even the youth, singing along.

Digits would continue to wave their own darkly magic wand, creating a vast appetite for mechanical beats and turning the world’s ears away from the complexities and eccentricities the island’s geniuses had produced. But even amid the most brittle of machine-generated rhythms, the DNA of Jamaican music still resonates, providing many of the subtleties they retain.