It’s never too late to check out old music. Jesse Kornbluth has some suggestions.
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The year was 1973. The Harder They Come was a cult movie, and my friends and I listened to the soundtrack like addicts. I mean: 24/7. The Wailers (before Bob Marley became God and the group was relegated to back-up status) came to town, and I met them, and Toots and The Maytals came to town, and I met them too.
Toots Hibbert was more fun. We zoomed around in my friend Steve’s open-air Jeep one night like the college kids Steve and I almost were. Toots came from a very different background, to say the least, but it was his good mood that pushed us onward. But then Toots always seems to be in a good mood.
We wanted to believe that we were on the ground floor of reggae, and he let us. Much later, I did the research and discovered that Toots had helped pioneer the music about a decade before I happened upon it. The son of a Seventh Day Adventist minister who preached in the Jamaican hills, he grew up dreaming of Kingston. He migrated there in the early 1960s, got a job in a barbershop, and hooked up with two other country boys, Raleigh and Jerry.
Toots is the Jamaican blend of James Brown and Otis Redding. He has a voice like a rasp — he can shout all night. Short, barrel-chested, endlessly smiling, he loves to perform, loves that people like his singing, loves the idea that music can bring people together in a way that fuses spirituality and, well, sex.
Toots and The Maytals had some hits in Jamaica, and then, in 1966, he was convicted of what he calls “a trumped-up ganja charge.” In his words:
I didn’t have any ganja, I didn’t even start smoking yet. They didn’t have no cause to do that, but they found some cause. People try to do things to hold you back in life. So they put me in jail for about nine months or so, and that’s where I wrote the song (“54-46, That’s My Number”). They gave me the privilege of using my guitar. I didn’t have to do other work, just play guitar.
And then, in 1968, Toots and The Maytals recorded “Do the Reggay,” the song that named the music. As he recalls:
There was the beat in Jamaica, reggae was played long before I started singing. And there was a slang, like a nickname for someone who don’t dress properly — like if you are barefoot, people would call you “streggae.” They say, “Hey, that guy is streggae, don’t talk to him.” If a girl don’t dress properly, like don’t have on any top, they call her streggae. So one morning, we just said, “Let’s go along and do some reggae.” Those days we’d just make stuff up, anything. A bird flies around the corner, you write a song about it. So we just say (singing): “Do the reggay, do the reggay,” and that’s it. A few words, y’know? And nobody paid it any mind until it started to go all over the world. I saw it in the Guinness Book of Records. So I thank God that I did something good, and I didn’t even plan it.
By the time I met this modest, friendly guy, he was huge in Jamaica, having already recorded most of his 31 hits. [To buy “The Best of Toots & The Maytals” from Amazon and get the MP3 download free, click here. For the MP3 download, click here.]
Naturally, his countrymen were crazy about this:
I’d only seen “The Harder They Come,” and was hooked on the addictive “Pressure Drop.”
This CD collects the Greater Hits. There are more to come; clearly, he’ll go to his grave singing. He should. “I try to give my audience the real everything,” he says. By which he means: music that makes you get up and dance.
Many make this claim. But by mixing R&B and reggae and his own beautiful soul, Toots pulls it off. He’ll never be as rich and famous as Bob Marley was, but he’s plenty satisfied with what he’s got. You will be too.
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This article originally appeared on The Head Butler.
Photo courtesy of Tune of The Day/Google Images.
thank the gods, we were both young(im 39) during the almost ‘century of syncopated popular music’, that i consider ended around 1995. the youth cultures we experienced were so potent. you are so particularly fortunate to have been a young man in the 1970s. I wish was older, i should really be 59 not 39, then i would have been able to fully enjoy the eras of (and not just at my boomer parents knee) the rocks, the metals, disco, the funks, reggae, loversrock, dub, brit soul, new wave, new romantics, electro funk! babyee, early house, techno sometimes i consider… Read more »
another fine article, such great music – pressure drop, chooon! reggae was a big sound here in the uk until the generational change 1990, and the dub bass part of it got absorbed into rave. miss hearing those booming slow reggae sound system – the deepest bass. love the slick clothes in the last clip. in the last 100yrs youth-musically, the boomers only rivals to being the greatest was 1920s new orleans jass explosion (the lost generation?) boomers were also my sporting idols, and in that they were the preeminent generation. they had the perfect blend of increasing physicality/ strength… Read more »