Ska: The Soundtrack of a Nation That Had Just Been Born (1950–1966)

There is no other country in the history of popular music that has produced a comparable density of innovation per inhabitant. The question of why Jamaica — why specifically that island, in that period — does not have a simple answer, but it does have a concrete story: the story of the sound systems, of the producers who fiercely rivaled each other, of the musicians who had absorbed American jazz and R&B and mixed it with Jamaican mento to create something completely new, and of a young generation that urgently needed its own music.

That story begins in the fifties, in the yards of Kingston's neighborhoods, with huge speakers mounted on trucks and a man with a collection of American records that no one else had.

The Sound System: The Invention That Changed Everything

Before ska existed, there was the sound system — and the sound system was the institution that made everything that came after possible.

A sound system was exactly what it sounds like: a portable sound system, built with homemade amplifiers and speakers the size of wardrobes, which its owner set up in any available lot or yard in western Kingston to organize a neighborhood party. There was no room for clubs or concert halls in Kingston's ghettos — the Jamaican working class had no access to those spaces. The sound system democratized music: any yard could become a nightclub, any night could become a party.

The pioneers of the sound systemTom The Great Sebastian, Roy Johnson, Duke Reid, and Clement "Coxsone" Dodd — competed with an all-encompassing ferocity: who had the most powerful speakers, who had the best American records, who attracted the most audience. That competition was called sound clash — the clash of sounds — and it was the most popular entertainment in 1950s Kingston.

Clement "Coxsone" Dodd was the son of a man who built radio cabinets. He grew up listening to American jazz — Louis Jordan, Lionel Hampton, Ella Fitzgerald — and in the fifties, he traveled to Florida as a migrant worker, where he discovered the hardest and most danceable R&B produced in the southern United States. He returned to Kingston with records under his arm and set up Sir Coxsone's Downbeat — the most respected sound system on the island.

His main rival was Duke Reid — "The Trojan" — a former police officer who organized his events with guns at his waist, as a symbol of authority and spectacle simultaneously. The competition between Coxsone and Duke Reid for the best American records was so intense that they both began to hide the labels on the vinyls so that no one else could buy the same tracks. And when that was no longer enough, they started recording their own exclusive records.

That decision — to record original music to avoid relying on American records — was the moment when Jamaican music was born.

Mento, R&B, and the Birth of Ska

Jamaica already had its own folk music before ska: mento — a Caribbean rhythm of African origin, with guitars, banjos, maracas, and humorous, risqué lyrics that were sung in rural areas — and the Trinidadian-influenced calypso that came from the English-speaking Caribbean. But for the urban youth of Kingston in the fifties, that music was too rural, too slow, too old.

What they received over the radio from New Orleans, from Memphis, from Chicago — the R&B of Fats Domino, the boogie of Louis Jordan, the jump blues of American brass bands — was what they wanted to hear. The Jamaican musicians who played in the sound systems absorbed these influences with the same hunger with which the sound system owners bought the records.

And at some point in the late fifties — no one can pinpoint exactly when, nor who was first — that absorption produced something new. American R&B had the rhythmic accent on the strong beat. Jamaican musicians inverted it: they placed the accent on the offbeat — on the second and fourth beats of the measure, where in jazz the cymbal is hit but where no one until then had placed the weight of the entire groove. The result was music that had the energy of R&B but sounded different, more syncopated, more urgent, with guitars and piano hitting on the offbeat as if all the music were leaning forward.

That was ska.

The exact etymology of the name is disputed. Some say it comes from the sound the guitar made on the offbeat: ska, ska, ska. Others attribute it to a word from Jamaican slang. What no one disputes is that the sound was unmistakable and that it was completely Jamaican.

Studio One and the Alpha Boys School

In 1963, Coxsone Dodd opened Studio One on Brentford Street in Kingston — the first black-owned recording studio in Jamaica — and hired a band of session musicians who played on all his records. The core of that band came from the same institution: the Alpha Boys School, a Catholic boarding school in Kingston that had taught music to generations of poor Jamaican children and produced an extraordinary proportion of the island's best instrumentalists.

These musicians — who would become the backbone of The Skatalites — had formally studied jazz and music theory, and that training gave them something that set them apart from their American contemporaries: the ability to articulate within a formal structure what in ska was instinctive. They knew exactly why the offbeat worked, and they could build on it with the precision of someone who has studied harmony.

The Skatalites — officially formed in 1964 with musicians like trombonist Don Drummond, tenor saxophonist Tommy McCook, saxophonist Roland Alphonso, and saxophonist Lester Sterling — became the session band for Studio One and the most important group in Jamaican ska. They recorded with everyone: with Bob Marley & The Wailers on their first single ("Simmer Down", 1963), with Prince Buster, with Toots and the Maytals, with Desmond Dekker.

"Guns of Navarone" (1965) — their ska version of the war movie theme — was their biggest international hit: a demonstration that Jamaican instrumental music could compete in any market in the world.

Prince Buster: The Rude Boy of the Song

Cecil Bustamente CampbellPrince Buster — was the artist who turned ska into a total cultural phenomenon: not just music but attitude, image, identity. A former bodyguard of Coxsone Dodd who went independent to create his own sound system and label, Buster was the representative of the rude boy — the young man from a poor neighborhood, unemployed, with his checkered suits and narrow-brimmed hat, who found in ska the sound of his rebellion.

His songs"Al Capone", "Madness", "One Step Beyond" — were anthems of that attitude: proud, confrontational, full of the specific humor of someone who has decided that if the system doesn't want him, he doesn't want the system either. When the British band Madness took their name and The Specials covered his music in the seventies and eighties, it was that attitude they were importing as much as the sound.

Toots Hibbert: The Voice that Named Reggae

Frederick "Toots" Hibbert — the vocalist of Toots and the Maytals — was the artist who connected ska with what would come next. His voice was the American soul within the body of Jamaican ska: a vocal urgency, a physical delivery to singing, that no other Jamaican artist of his generation matched.

In 1968, he recorded a song called "Do the Reggay" — with the new spelling of the word that described the new rhythm that was replacing ska. It was the first recording to use the word reggae — Hibbert, unintentionally, had named Jamaica's most influential genre.

Ska Arrives in Great Britain

The Jamaican migration to the United Kingdom in the fifties and sixties — organized under the Empire Windrush, the immigration program that brought Caribbean workers to rebuild post-war Great Britain — brought ska to the Jamaican communities of London, Birmingham, and Bristol. There, the music from Kingston's sound systems found its second audience: first the young mod subculture, and then the original skinheads — a multiracial working-class subculture that adopted Jamaican ska and rocksteady as their music, before the term was appropriated by racist groups in the seventies.

This contact between Jamaican music and British youth culture planted the seed for what in the seventies and eighties would become the 2 Tone movement: The Specials, Madness, The Selector — bands that mixed Jamaican ska with punk and produced some of the most influential records of British music of the time.

Editorial Note: Don Drummond — the trombonist of the Skatalites, considered the most gifted musician in the history of Jamaican ska — spent the last years of his life in Kingston's Bellevue Hospital, Jamaica's main psychiatric hospital, where he was admitted in 1966 after killing his partner, dancer Anita "Marguerita" Mahfood. He was thirty-two years old. He died there in 1969, at thirty-five, from causes not completely clarified. His trombone solos in the Skatalites' recordings have a melancholy that no musical analysis can fully explain. Perhaps it doesn't need to be explained. Perhaps it's enough to listen to it.