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.