Black Sheep: A Connecticut Yankee In Reggae

Who Else Need Fe Know? Credits and Session Work

Posted on by abassford

I never set out to be a session musician. I wanted to be the lead guitarist in a famous rock and roll band, like George Harrison of the Beatles. The Beatles were my favorite band. Girls loved them. Their pictures were on album covers. And I heard them every day on WDRC, one of Hartford’s two Top Forty radio stations. My tiny transistor radio was permanently set to 1360 AM, the home of Big D, as the DJs called it. (The “Big D” emanated from an absurdly tiny building  in nearby Bloomfield, CT. But from the way the DJs talked about it, you would have thought it was the biggest structure in Hartford.) My brother and I had gotten the radios as Christmas gifts in 1964. This little box with one mono earpiece had changed my life irrevocably once I discovered that I could find WDRC on it. My parents’ radio was permanently set to WTIC, which was snoozeville. WDRC was the station that the cool kids at school listened to, and now I could listen to it too.

Apart from the Ed Sullivan Show, which my parents rarely watched, The Big D was the only evidence I had that the universe outside of my little town was a fascinating, turbulent place. At any given moment, a singer or a band with an accent or a rhythm I had never heard before might become hugely popular. The world of Top 40 Radio was reconfigured weekly based on local record sales. The most exciting part of every week was the Top Ten countdown. As a sports fan, I loved the competition and rooted for my favorite records to stay around as long as possible. If the Beatles had a record out, it invariably ended up at number one. The only questions were how many weeks it would take the song to get there and how long it would stay.

I didn’t know too much about the Beatles. Their hair was quite controversial, they had funny accents, and they were from Liverpool, which was somewhere in England. In the pre-internet world, that was about all one could find out about pop stars.

But whatever the Beatles’ lives were like, they were clearly too busy to work in the insurance industry. Hartford at that time was known as “The Insurance Capital Of The World.” My father worked at the Aetna. My uncle worked at Connecticut General. My mother had worked at the Travelers. Other relatives had worked at the Metropolitan in New York. (My aunt somehow managed to avoid this by becoming a librarian like my grandmother, the other traditional family occupation.) I grew up hearing about life insurance, health insurance, property insurance, casualty insurance, rates, premiums, and actuarial tables. My parents’ nightly discussions about his day at the office filled me with quiet horror. It sounded like school, but longer, more boring, and with a stricter dress code. Nothing any of the other grownups I knew did sounded any better.

Every weekday my father got up early. He made us breakfast. Then he put on one of his two suits (black or dark blue). He left for the office a little before eight, and was invariably home before six-thirty. When he got in, he would kiss my mother, look in on my brother and I, and then talk with my mother in the kitchen about insurance while she cooked.

Was this what life as an adult would be like? I loved my parents. But there had to be something other than this to hope for when I grew up. Although I had no answer, I was definitely asking the question. And The Beatles, at least, had figured out an alternative.

George was my favorite Beatle. He wasn’t the most popular or the cutest, which was encouraging. He didn’t sing lead, which seemed daunting. He didn’t talk to the audience. And he played all the guitar solos, which were my favorite parts of the songs anyway. As far as I was concerned, George had the best deal of anybody in the band. Plus, he had long hair, girls loved him, and his music annoyed my parents. George made playing the guitar look like a very good idea.

But playing the guitar remained just that for me, an idea. I picked up the bass when I was 13 because the band down the street needed a bass player. Then I saw B. B. King on TV and the world changed. My idea had to become a reality. Through a neighbor’s divorce, I miraculously acquired a cheap electric guitar a few weeks later. I already had a bass amp, which would have to do for the time being.

I had a guitar and amp. But I also had a huge identity crisis. I wanted to be B. B. King. I wanted to be Black, wear a brightly colored suit, own a Gibson semi-hollow guitar, and sing and play the blues like no one else. This was a peculiar desire for an eighth grader living in a house in the Hartford suburbs to have, but there it was. I knew what I wanted out of life. And it wasn’t actuarial tables.

Not for the first time, my dreams ran up against an uncomfortable reality. Not only wasn’t I Black, I didn’t even know any Black people. (This would change later, but it was a significant obstacle at the time.)

Even worse, I couldn’t begin to sing the blues. I tried a couple of times when no one was home and the results were devastating. Clearly, I needed to scale down my dream a bit. For a while, I imagined that I would play guitar with B. B. in his band. He was the only guitarist on the TV show I saw. But if I could only meet him, perhaps he would see how much I loved his music and let me play with him when I got good enough.

At the time, there were a number of popular blues-influenced rock bands around. Most of them were British, but they were more my age. Not only was B. B. King Black, but he was obviously much older than the people who were in rock bands. And he’d clearly had been playing the guitar for a long time. Doing what he did seemed impossible, though I was able to figure out some of the notes.

The guys in rock bands couldn’t have been playing all that long. Sounding like them seemed much more attainable. Plus, girls my age liked them. (When I mentioned blues to one of my big crushes at the time, her response was, “Blues? Only old Black people who work in the cotton fields in the South like blues.” This was not the reaction I was looking for.) My dream had to be reconfigured.

So, when I actually started learning the guitar, Jeff Beck, then in the Yardbirds, was my new role model. He stood off to the side of the stage with his Esquire and his smirk, reeling off continuous streams of brilliance. Then as now, Jeff had a great haircut and an air of offhand mastery that I found really appealing. I sat down with “Jeff’s Boogie” and slowed it down to 16 rpm on my Woolworth’s record player. I figured if I could play “Jeff’s Boogie” I could play just about anything else. And it sounded something like blues, but cheerful and not as deep.

Much to my surprise, with a bit of work the licks fell under my fingers and the guitar started to make sense to me. After two weeks I could play almost all of it. (Though a couple of the overdubs confused me as I didn’t know which part I was supposed to play.) Playing the guitar was clearly something I could do. And I’d figured it out by myself without a teacher or written music. I was hooked.

As a terminally unpopular kid, doing something that other people my age thought was cool was extremely appealing. Plus, I loved it. I loved the sound. I loved the feeling of the strings under my fingers. And I loved the feeling of triumph when I figured out something that I really wanted to learn.

The next step was playing in bands. There were quite a few of them around, though they only played locally. It was unclear how one made the jump from CYO mixers (where the nuns walked around with rulers cut down to seven inches to monitor the distance between dancing couples) to the Ed Sullivan Show, the pinnacle of mainstream show business success at the time. But if you didn’t sing, it was obvious that you had to be in a band of like-minded people your age, at least one of whom could sing a bit.

So, I played in bands. I’d always enjoyed team sports and there were a lot of parallels. Plus, the chances of severe injury were somewhat lower. I played in bands for eight years before someone asked me to play on a recording session, much to my astonishment. The person who asked me was the great reggae singer Horace Andy and the record turned out to be his Seventies classic, “In The Light.”

As an avid reader of record covers, I knew what session musicians were. But it had never occurred to me to become one. I was never a hippie, but I was quite idealistic. I believed that playing only music I truly believed in, in a band with fellow true believers, was the only way to go. Session players, I thought, were hacks. I imagined them as old, bitter guys who hated popular music but were good enough to play it when required. Playing music you hated sounded a lot like working at the Aetna.

I didn’t want to be a hack. But I didn’t want to miss a chance to play the guitar either. So, I said yes.

When I bought a copy of the album, there was my name (albeit misspelled as “Bashford”) in the fine print on the cover, along with the names of all the other musicians. I looked at it for quite a while. My name was on a record. I wasn’t just somebody who played bars and high school dances. My name was on a record. A record with a somewhat oddly designed cover on a small label, but a record nonetheless. There was independent confirmation that I existed, and had played guitar on a record. It wasn’t just a dream any longer.

I assumed that Horace would immediately put a band together consisting of the people who played on the record and we would go out and tour. This was not to be, though it was discussed. Then Clem Paddyfote, a Hartford bandleader, asked me to play on his recording session, even though I was not a member of his group. Not only did Clem put my name, correctly spelled, on the back cover, he took a picture of us and put that on the front cover! I wasn’t that happy with how I played on the record. But I couldn’t complain about being properly credited for it.

Now my name was on two records, with two different sets of musicians. Once was an accident. Twice was something else. I then recorded with a band I was playing with, Billy and the Buttons, and did another recording session for an excellent songwriter and piano player, Bob Genovesi. The recordings weren’t issued at the time, but they sounded like records, not demos. I also did some recording at Trod Nossel, a well-known Connecticut studio, as part of my audition for the Scratch Band, a gig that I didn’t get.

By this time, I was a bit more acclimated to the studio process, and a bit less terrified. As much as I hated hearing my playing, there was something rewarding about hearing it on big speakers. And the thought that the results might be pressed into vinyl and purchased by the less discriminating was very intriguing.

However, I still thought of recording as incidental to gigging as a way of making a living. At the time Connecticut had a truly thriving live music scene; a lot of people I knew were making pretty good money doing nothing else.

So when I went to Jamaica in 1980, much to my astonishment I realized that the musicians I wanted to play with rarely appeared live. I assumed that Sly and Robbie and Lloyd Parks played in bars, and that I would find out what bars they played in and try to sit in. No such luck. Kingston in 1980 was in a state of siege. Live music was almost nonexistent. The guys I wanted to play with were doing recording sessions, not playing in clubs. So I knew I had to start playing sessions too if I wanted to work with them.

The great producer Henry “Junjo” Lawes took a chance on me a month or so after I arrived and hired me for a session with Roots Radics.  Within six months I was doing recording sessions regularly. I also had joined the very popular Lloyd Parks and We The People Band, so I was doing live shows as well. Producers and artists came to watch the band, liked what they heard, and started hiring me. So did some of the artists the band backed on stage.

All of a sudden, I had a session career. I learned an incredible amount about music very fast. I made very good money for the time and place. Best of all, I got to play with almost all of my heroes, just as I had dreamed might happen. In the process, I had become one of those people whose name shows up on records a lot. I haven’t stopped doing sessions since. I did two last week.

It’s strange how things work out. When we first moved to the Bronx, we were friends with a hippie couple who had lived on the Farm, a huge commune outside of Nashville founded by one of the original Haight-Ashbury people. They had a band that played defiantly original music, no covers. And they were quietly aghast at my willingness to play weddings, bar gigs, sessions, or whatever to feed my family.

Although they were too polite to say so directly, they had real questions about my integrity, or lack thereof. I was obviously talented, so why was I doing this? Wasn’t music supposed to reflect your deepest thoughts and feelings? What was I doing playing music, and worse, recording, just for the money?

It wasn’t only hippies who thought this way about session men. As an avid reader of Hit Parader magazine in the late sixties and early seventies, I remember very well the prevailing attitude about using session men on records. It was perceived as inauthentic or plastic. (Remember when your career would have been over if you sold a tune for a car commercial? Ha!) I even convinced myself that the Beatles played all the instruments on “Sergeant Pepper,” and was baffled at the session credits for outside musicians on “Rubber Soul.”

I can understand this prejudice against hired session guns. I do think that musicians should have ideals (like anybody else) and try to live up to them. But this attitude kept a lot of great and historically significant groups of players like the Funk Brothers and the Wrecking Crew, to name just two examples,  from getting the credit they deserved.

The older guys in the Maytals suffered from this practice tremendously. They played on probably half of the records cut in Jamaica from 1966 through 1974, when Toots got signed to Island and they started touring with him, which cut down their session work. Jamaica was one of the largest recording centers in the world during this period, so that meant these guys made a lot of records, very few of which had their names on the jackets.

Reggae uses a lot of the same bass lines over and over, and Jackie Jackson, Toots’ bass player, created many of them. The bass line in the Staple Singers’ “I’ll Take You There” is a note-for-note copy of one of his lines from a hit instrumental called “Liquidator.” For quite a while the Maytals drum chair was shared by Paul Douglas and Winston Grennan, up to Winston’s death in 2000. Both of these masters played on thousands of records without credit, and Winston in particular was very bitter about it.

I loved Winston (I played in his own band off and on for sixteen years). He was one of the great characters in the history of music, like a cross between Art Blakey and the Tasmanian Devil. In addition to his reggae credentials, he had played with just about everybody you could imagine in 70s jazz and R & B, but could never remember their names. You would have to prompt him. “Yeah, mon, me play wid dis famous jazz trumpeter for a minute. Him call me fe sub a Montreux Jazz troo im drummer did sick. Me cyan remember him name.”

“A Black guy or white guy, Winston?” I don’t generally refer to people by race unless it’s necessary, but I thought this might help him narrow it down.

“American Black mon. (Jamaicans are very careful to differentiate between Caribbean and American Blacks.) Old time bebop mon. Him wicked. Play very fast and high.”

“Did he have a funny-shaped trumpet, like somebody bent it?”

“Yeah, mon. It sound great.”

“Dizzy Gillespie?”

“Yeah, mon! A dat him name! Great musician, mon. Very funny guy and him very fair with the money.”

Now if I had subbed on a Dizzy Gillespie gig at Montreux, you would have to hit me over the head to make me stop talking about it, and I certainly would remember his name! Winston, being Winston, had forgotten.

However, if you asked Winston about any record cut in Jamaica between the time he started recording and the time he came to the US in 1974, he could tell you who played drums on it and where it was recorded. If he had played on it, he could also tell you everybody else who was on the session. He could also tell you if the producer had paid him or not!

One day at sound check he was particularly vocal about the injustices of life and all the records he played on that he didn’t get credit for, and all the younger, more famous reggae drummers who had copied various aspects of his style. All of these complaints were completely justified, but we’d heard them before. Once or twice. Everyone in the Maytals had suffered similar injustices, and we were all used to Winston venting about them occasionally. But for some reason, on this particular day Winston was really getting on Jackie Jackson’s nerves.

Jackie stood at the side of the stage with his arms folded and a pained expression, looking at Winston like a disappointed older brother. I watched him listen silently to Winston’s monologue for several minutes. Finally I edged over to his side of the stage. I said, “Jackie, you played on easily as many records that  you didn’t get credit for as Winston did, if not more. How do you feel about it?”

Jackie looked at me for a moment. Jackie is a man of few words, but like the notes in his bass lines, they are extremely well chosen.

“Anderson (as he calls me when he is being formal), If me play pon a session, mi know seh that mi play on de record. De artist knows mi play pon fe him record. And God know seh mi play pon de record. Who else need fe know?” And that was the end of the discussion.

For quite a while record companies, at least most of them, were meticulous about crediting musicians appropriately. But now that recorded music is streamed or downloaded instead of being purchased on CDs or vinyl, the issue of being credited for session work is back with us again. How can you tell who played on a digital download? I guess it’s back to obscurity…or relentlessly taking photos during the session and posting them on social media…I don’t know the answer.

It’s human, I think, to want credit for what you do, particularly if you have a performer’s ego, which I do. But whenever I get discouraged about this state of affairs, I remind myself of Jackie’s wise words and tell myself: “God know seh mi play pon de record. Who else need fe know?”

There Are Many Flowers In The Garden Of Jah: In Memory of Winston “Bo Pee” Bowen

Posted on by abassford

I had been in Jamaica six weeks. It was a hot September day in 1980, the worst election in Jamaica’s history was at peak intensity, and a hurricane had just passed. The great singer Freddie McKay had brought me to Channel One Studio in the heart of Whitfield Town at the request of rising producer Junjo Lawes. I was naïve, excited, and terrified at the thought that I might get to play on a recording session in Kingston. I didn’t really understand patois then and had no idea what to expect. I had a feeling that I might not get a warm welcome though.

We walked into the crowded control room in the middle of a take. Roots Radics was in the studio and the sound coming through the monitors was the loudest and most powerful reggae I’d heard up close. Already nervous, I was now totally intimidated. When the take was finished, the musicians came into the control room. After the playback, everyone suddenly noticed that there was a stranger in their midst. There was silence for a minute. A room full of people regarded me with everything from open hostility to veiled curiosity. Then they started talking. I couldn’t catch what was being said, but I knew I was the topic of discussion. I had never felt more lost and out of my depth in my life.

Then suddenly one of the people leaning against the control room window smiled and stepped forward. He wore rectangular gold-rimmed glasses, a cap, and a sports shirt. Extending his hand, he announced graciously and deliberately, “Hello.” He said it like he was greeting a head of state. He paused briefly for effect. “I am Bo Pee.” A half beat of rest. “What is your name? And where are you from?”

“My name is Andy Bassford. I’m from Hartford, Connecticut.” I couldn’t believe my luck. An obsessive reader of liner notes, I knew exactly who Bo Pee was. In fact, he was one of the Jamaican guitarists I most admired and wanted to meet. And he seemed friendly!

He smiled again and we shook hands. Then his curiosity overcame his formality. In an entirely different voice he asked, “And what is that you have under your arm?” It was absolutely the last thing I expected him to say, and probably the best thing he could have said.

Not knowing what might be required on the session, I had brought my guitar and a homemade pedalboard containing guitar effects that my father had built for me. I was holding it under one arm because the power cable would trail on the floor otherwise. In 1980 pedalboards were not common even in America, and mine might have been the first one seen in Jamaica.

Relieved to have someone to talk to, and something to talk about, I opened the case, showed him how it was wired, and what the effects did. Bo was fascinated. So was Sowell Bailey, the other guitarist on the session, who also stepped forward to watch. Now we were three guitar players talking, not foreigner and locals, and the entire atmosphere in the room changed. Junjo cut the conversation short and the band went back into the studio. Later in the session, Bo got up and let me play two songs in his place. Somehow, I got through them, Junjo paid me, and that was the start of my Jamaican studio career.

After the session, Bo Pee was very insistent that I stay in touch, and we met the next day at Lloyd Parks’ record shop on Half Way Tree Road, home base for the We The People Band. We talked guitars and music for hours. Despite our obvious differences, we found we had a lot in common. We both played Gibson SG guitars, we both had learned primarily by watching other guitarists, and we both learned our basic chords from the Mickey Baker guitar book. Bo drove me around Kingston in his little green Anglia, ran errands, went to the betting shop, picked up his kids from school, and finally dropped me off at Cross Roads so I could get the bus back to Portmore. It was an amazing afternoon. Once again, I couldn’t believe my luck. I had a guitar brother in a strange land.

A few weeks later we recorded the Wailing Souls’ “Fire House Rock” album, and I had the experience of playing with Bo Pee for the first time. It was magical from note one, and the magic remained for every note of the five years we worked together. The only way I can describe it is that when I played with Bo Pee, I always felt like I had an extra pair of arms. Two guitars in a band can sometimes butt heads, but that never happened with Bo. Whatever he played fit in perfectly with what I chose to play.

Bo had spent a lot of time in We The People as the only guitarist and had developed a way of holding the rhythm while dropping lead embellishments in the gaps. Once we started working together, he kept this approach, dialing it back a bit to give me room. At times it sounded like there were three guitars playing instead of two. Sometimes I hear our recordings and I’m not sure who played what.

Once I joined We The People six months later, I got to know Bo even better, and appreciate him more. Like all great musicians, the way Bo Pee played was an extension of who he was. There was something courtly about Bo, as if he came from an earlier, slower, and gentler time, or perhaps another dimension where people were kinder to each other and always took time to smell the roses. He was a true gentleman. I never saw him be rude to anyone; the same politeness and warmth he showed to me was there for everyone. It was hard to look at Bo Pee, no matter what kind of mood you were in, and not smile. He was very sensitive to beauty and had a deep love for nature in general and flowers in particular.

I loved his voice. Bo had a deliberate, gracious way of speaking, as if he was tasting each word before saying it. Shema McGregor told me that whenever he spoke to her, Bo Pee would always use her full name, Yashemabeth. I know why he did so; he thought it was a beautiful name, loved how it felt to say it, and couldn’t bear to shorten it and make it less beautiful. And he had a wonderful laugh, almost like a bark if he was surprised.

Bo Pee was a huge influence on me as a guitar player. I literally cannot play reggae rhythm and not think about him. I’ve borrowed from him shamelessly, as have a lot of other guitarists. But as well as I know his playing, I still marvel at how lyrical and graceful it was. Bo was a relentless student of the instrument. He was always practicing and loved nothing more than to learn something new. We spent hours talking about scales, chords, and theory.

When Bo played live, it always looked to me as though he was walking on air. One night in Kansas City, on our first tour of the States with Dennis Brown, we’d had a particularly horrible road day, and everybody was tired and angry. Dennis always featured the band on “The Drifter,” and when it came time to take his solo that night, Bo played some complex rhythms I’d never heard before, and his feet seemed to be floating above the stage as he danced. I’ve never seen or heard anything like it before or since. It was as though he was processing the entire band’s frustration and anger into beauty before our eyes. The audience went crazy, and I felt renewed, not beaten down.

Bo, being a man who loved beauty in all its manifestations, was a great lover and admirer of the opposite sex. Once we were standing outside a hotel in Ocho Rios waiting to get in the van, and a remarkably beautiful woman walked by. We both watched intently until she turned the corner. She was stunning. We looked at each other wordlessly for a moment. Then, after one of his patented pauses, Bo declaimed, as if he were a preacher addressing a packed church, “There are many flowers in the garden of Jah.” It was a perfect summation of how we felt.

And it was how Bo lived. He did his best to cultivate and care for the garden of Jah in which we all live, and to make it more beautiful, not less, through the gifts of his spirit, his love for all things, and his music. I was blessed to know Bo Pee, and to play music with him, and I use what he taught me every time I play the guitar. Thank you, my friend. You planted many, many flowers along your road.

Alton Ellis: Rediffusion and Rock Steady on Atlantic Avenue

Posted on by abassford

This is an essay I wrote in 2004 after a rehearsal with Alton and the Kingston Crew, at Courtney Panton’s studio in Brooklyn. I realized that I haven’t posted it before, so I’m doing it now. As we know, Alton has passed and Kingston Crew has been sidelined in favor of New Kingston. But these are other stories for another time. This is Jamaican musical history from the source. Enjoy!

Alton Ellis is a slight, dapper Jamaican man, somewhere in his early sixties, with an oval face, intelligent eyes, and very dark skin. Unless you’re a Jamaican over the age of forty or a diehard reggae fan, you’ve probably never heard of him. He doesn’t cut an overtly dramatic figure, and he’s not someone you would immediately notice on the subway, but Alton Ellis is the original, the stamper from which all reggae singers are cut; Jamaican music’s alpha to its omega of dancehall.

Rehearsal is finished at Kingston Studio on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn. It’s about 11:30 P.M. on a Thursday night, it’s wet outside, and Alton has worked the band hard. He and fellow rock steady veterans Ken Boothe and Phyllis Dillon are headlining the Mother’s Day show at Carib-New York, a Jamaican nightclub in New Rochelle and one of the important stops on the reggae circuit outside of Jamaica. Mother’s Day is an important Caribbean holiday, these singers are still very popular among older Jamaicans, and a large turnout is expected.

Although Alton played Central Park last summer for the Jamaica Tourist Board, he doesn’t get to New York much. Like many Jamaican singers who have fought their way out of the indescribable Kingston ghettoes, he now makes his home elsewhere, having lived in England for almost thirty years, and he performs primarily in Europe.

Alton has just returned from Japan, where he is also popular. Although you might expect him to be exhausted after a fifteen hour plane ride, a day doing promotion for the upcoming show on several local reggae radio programs, and a three hour rehearsal, he’s in a mood to talk, and the Kingston Crew, a group I’ve been jamming with this year, are in a mood to listen. These battle-scarred veterans of the New York reggae wars have played with just about everybody; they’re not impressed by celebrity, record deals, or world tours, and their attitude toward most artists is a mixture of polite professionalism and wariness with an undercurrent of urgency. Let’s learn the set fast. Next artist. Time is money; we’re finished; we’re out of here.

But Alton is not just any artist. As Kingston Crew keyboardist Horace James describes him, “Alton is the model for all yard (Jamaican) singers.” His first hit, “Muriel,” which he wrote and recorded in 1959 as part of the duo Alton and Eddie, was also the beginning for the legendary Jamaican record producer Coxsone Dodd, and helped establish his Studio One label. To give some sense of historical perspective, this was three years before both Jamaican independence and the development of ska, commonly considered the beginning of modern Jamaican musical history. Bob Marley was fourteen years old in 1959, Toots Hibbert of the Maytals fifteen or so.

Unlike nearly every other fifties artist, Alton continued his run of hits well into the seventies, and is still writing and recording. But his influence on reggae extends far beyond his remarkable catalog of songs, which have been covered many times by dozens of artists, and “versioned” (used as the blueprints for other reggae tracks) thousands of times more. His classic “Get Ready To Rock Steady” named a whole musical movement, changing the direction of Jamaican music from uptempo ska to the seductive slow burn of rock steady.

Alton’s love of major seventh chords and romantic melodies created the blueprint for lovers’ rock. His voice, soulful, painfully honest, and yearning, proudly Jamaican with little debt to American R&B or gospel styles, was the starting point for hundreds of reggae singers. There are singers with bigger voices and more technique, but no one has ever been more direct or sincere than Alton Ellis. His singing goes straight to the heart.

But perhaps even more than his songs or his vocal style, Alton’s persona shaped the singers who followed him. “Cry Tough”, the title of one of his best songs, captures it in two syllables: the voice of a poor, strong, man whose only valuable earthly possession, and, paradoxically, greatest vulnerability, is the depth of his ability to love. In the brutal world of the ghetto, a man trying to survive with humanity intact clings to the ideal of true love with a death grip. It is the only earthly gift he has to give, a gift limited only by the depths of his soul. Nearly every major male Jamaican singer since—Bob Marley, John Holt, Dennis Brown, Gregory Isaacs, and Freddie McGregor, to name just a few—has absorbed this stance, walking in Alton’s shadow at least part of the way down their own road to artistry.

So when Alton talks, his words carry weight, and even jaded and cynical musicians listen. And he feels like talking tonight. Maybe it’s the jet lag, or the relief of a successful rehearsal. Like most reggae artists, Alton does not make enough money to afford his own band, so he has to depend on each show’s promoter to find musicians in the area to play for him, and their competence can vary wildly. When confronted with a weak band, some artists just wince, go through the motions, take the money, and run.

Alton, a bright and sensitive man whose feelings always seem to be pulsing just under his skin, is not very good at doing this. He is particular about how his songs are played, and has very specific ideas for their arrangements. Unlike many singers, Alton is also knowledgeable and articulate enough about music to explain what he wants, and focused enough to insist on getting it. His rehearsals can be long and arduous if the musicians are careless, incompetent, or otherwise not up to his standards. Even good players who know the music have to work hard for him.

But the Kingston Crew are seasoned pros, respect Alton “to the ground,” and have done their homework. Everyone has enjoyed an evening immersed in the classics, and classics they are, properly played and beautifully sung. The set list for the show is nothing but hits, songs that shaped a whole idiom. The rehearsal has been more satisfying than many gigs, it’s still raining outside, and no one is in a hurry to leave.

So Alton, his road manager, the musicians, and a few other people with no obvious function beyond what appears to be an inalienable right to listen, congregate in the front room of Kingston Music to cool out. The space consists of this front area, which opens onto the street, a cramped rehearsal room behind it which doubles as a booth for recording, a small studio control room, and an even tinier office and bathroom way in the back.

During the day, Jah Son, the Kingston Crew’s loyal equipment man and general aide-de-camp, runs a small business selling tapes, CDs, and Rastafarian paraphenalia to passersby during the day, while the recording studio goes full blast behind him, often straight through to the next morning. But now, dimly lit by the lights still burning in the rehearsal room behind us, the posters, display cases, and counters set the stage for Alton and his stories. Somewhat surprisingly for a reggae rehearsal, the air is ganja free. None of the band indulge, and Alton, although a legendary smoker for most of his life, gave up the practice several years ago when he decided it was affecting his voice.

He turns down a proffered spliff and talks about not smoking any more, although he is a Rastafarian. “Me smoke enough fe two lifetimes! Me used to sit down with Bob Marley and Mortimer Planno (Marley’s spiritual mentor), so you know wha gwaan! No man could build a spliff (marijuana cigarette) in a de yard. Pure pipe! Nothing but chalice! Every day de dread dem come from country and drop off ganja fe Planno. Ganja, and Bible reading, and reasoning fe de whole day! Next day, same ting again. But me done with dat now. It was hard fe stop, but me do it. I give thanks every day. I want to last as long as I can in this business. Nuff of us drop out now. Dead, or naa inna it again, or sick.”

One of the band asks him about Japan. “Yes, mon. I very busy now. I just come back from dere. I haf fe give Jah thanks and praise fe de work. Is very few of us left. About fifteen of us. Desmond Dekker, Derrick Morgan, myself, Skatalites, few others. So you find that de likkle work is enough fe go round fe all of us! Give thanks!”

He tells about his tumultuous relationship with Coxsone (“a mudfish”, his road manager mutters) and how Coxsone’s great rival Duke Reid would fire his gun in the studio if he didn’t like how a session was going.

“Me vex wid Duke fe de gun bidness. ‘So Duke, suppose somebody dead?’ me ask him. ‘Wha yu haf fe seh’ bout dat?’ Duke look pon me, smile, and say, ‘Accident.'” Alton remembers when the guns first came to Jamaica through the machinations of the politicians. He remembers the shock of seeing the crates of weapons when they came to Matches Lane in the sixties, and the rude boys’ excitement as they cracked them open, beginning the epidemic of violence which has plagued the country ever since, even spreading with the drug posses throughout the world.

“Gun ting gone on from ever since. Dem wicked politics mon bring dem come, and de guns run dem. Guns run Jamaica now, not politics.” Alton talks about how he sang for so long for so little, before any kind of money was in reggae, before anyone in Jamaica ever suspected the world beyond its 1440 square miles might have any interest in it. Speaking of money, Alton talks about how much the musicians who played on his records—Roland Alphanso, Jackie Jackson, Lloyd Brevett, Aubrey Adams, Carl Malcolm, Lynn Taitt, and the others—contributed to his music, how much it meant to him, and how little money and credit they got.

“Dem man deh get no mention. Nuttin’. Not even dem name pon de jacket. I never get much neither, but I get me picture deh pon de front cover, and I get me name.” He talks about leaving the music business for a while after “Muriel” didn’t make the money he expected, and how his old friend, the late Joe Higgs, inspired him to return.

“Yu stop sing? Alton, me naa stop sing fe nuttin’! Oonu cyaan stop sing!” And then he talks about Rediffusion. He talks about what it was like to be poor, and listening to the Rediffusion from his neighbor’s yard.

“What was Rediffusion?” someone asks. Alton explains: Rediffusion was a radio in a plain wooden box, which could not be bought, only rented, for twelve shillings a month. It had only one station (Rediffusion, of course), and only one knob, which turned the radio on and off and controlled the volume.

“Did you have one?”

Alton laughs. “Twelve shillings was ’nuff money den! Me father could never in life have found twelve shillings a month fe Rediffusion. I used to stay so—” and he arches his whole body and cups an ear to demonstrate. For a moment he is again a teenager in a tenement yard in Kingston, his whole being focused on absorbing the music coming from next door. Alton, like many roots Jamaicans, has real acting skills. You can almost see the zinc fence through which he is listening to the music.

“Was it a big thrill the first time you heard yourself on the radio?” The Kingston Crew is asking Alton questions with unmistakable reverence, as if they were interviewers instead of musicians. This is a part of their history they have never heard. They really want to know.

Alton pauses for a moment before replying, and his answer is surprising.

“Not the biggest. The biggest thrill for me was hearing Higgs and Wilson on the radio, because they had a record before me and they were my friends.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, mon. I never forget the feeling. Never.” He folds his arms, raises his eyes to the ceiling, takes a breath, and speaks as if praying. “I said to myself, a my FRIEND dat. I was so proud. I was so proud that my friend was on the radio and that I knew him.”

The room is silent. All of a sudden I am aware of the sounds of traffic on Atlantic Avenue driving through the rain. It dawns on me what a journey this man has taken. I have lived in Kingston, I have worked in its ghetto studios, I have played on the sessions, been to the dances, performed with the artists and musicians for decades. I have a part in the music’s story myself. But this is the first time I have really understood what limits this man has transcended, the distance he has traveled from the expectations he grew up with.

It seems to strike Alton too. “We come a far way. We come such a far way.” He speaks quietly. “We never dreamed the music would reach so far. None of us. Coxsone, Duke, the Skatalites, meself. None of us imagined. Give thanks again.”

“Was your father proud when he heard you on the radio?” A big smile creases Alton’s face.

“Him? Every morning him out in de yard before him gone a work. Like so.” Alton puts his hands on his hips and turns his head to one side as if listening next door, and for a brief moment he becomes the older Ellis. He looks very different from when he was imitating himself as a youngster. His whole affect changes.

You can see the father’s pride in his son, his vulnerability, his bafflement at the workings of the modern world. After an honest life of hard labor and no expectations beyond payday, church, and Sunday rice and peas, suddenly, with no warning, you hear your son’s voice booming across the yard every day, coming out of a luxury item next door you yourself can’t afford. It is a triumph for the family, the yard, the whole neighborhood. It is an unimaginable success, an undreamed of achievement, a moment of great joy and pride, an unexpected payoff for a lifetime of struggle, but where, pray tell, does it fit in the scheme of things? The world is changing beneath his feet.

Then Alton laughs, snaps out of character, and the vision is gone. “Him dying fe Rediffusion play ‘Muriel’ before him lef a morning. Him never check fe it before, but him love Rediffusion from dem times on.” Now he winds down a little, as if the memory of his father was what he was trying to access. Instruments are packed up; phone numbers are exchanged; and Alton inquires about the time of tomorrow’s rehearsal with Phyllis and Ken. There are three more numbers he thinks he might want to sing. Will the band be able to find time for him?

Yes, of course, Courtney, the bandleader, assures him. If he comes about ten, we will still be there, and the other artists should be finished by then. Alton puts on his dark green and yellow windbreaker, then carefully adjusts his pork pie hat. It suddenly dawns on me that Alton is not just a musical influence. In addition to shaping an idiom, he’s also the guy all the younger ska bands like the Specials and The Mighty Mighty Bosstones are trying to dress like.

His road manager gathers up her notebook and purse and they head down Atlantic Avenue, going toward one more show, one more strange band, and one more night singing the old songs one more time. But he doesn’t look tired or bored; not at all. As he says the music has, indeed, come a far way, and Alton is by no means finished traveling along with it.