ENTITY · PERSON (ARTIST, SELECTOR, PRODUCER…)
Alton Ellis
Well supported
Alton Ellis was a Jamaican singer closely associated with the birth of rocksteady - his own song "Rocksteady" (1966) is one source of the genre's name - recording for both Coxsone Dodd's Studio One and Duke Reid's Treasure Isle. His ballad "I'm Still in Love," released in 1967, became one of the most repeatedly re-voiced and sampled rhythms in Jamaican music, covered and versioned across reggae and dancehall for decades after.
He was admitted to hospital at the end of 2007 for treatment of cancer of the lymph glands and died of it in October 2008; rumours of his death had circulated days earlier and been dispelled by his family before it was confirmed. Born in Kingston in 1944, he began in the late 1950s in the duo Alton & Eddie before recording for Duke Reid at Treasure Isle alongside the Flames, his brother Leslie Ellis, David "Baby G" Gordon and Winston Jarrett.
He was inducted into the International Reggae & World Music Awards Hall of Fame in 2006. The obituary is dated Saturday 11 October 2008 and says he died "this morning"; no second source fixes the exact day.
At a glance
- Confidence
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- Sources
- United Reggae, "Legendary Alton Ellis is gone".
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The rude boy: did ska and rocksteady glamorize the gunman?
One side
Music as social commentary on poverty and injustice
The other
Music as glorification of criminal violence
Across the ska and rocksteady years, records split sharply over the 'rude boy' figure of the armed Kingston youth. One camp of songs condemned or pleaded with the rudies to stand down (Alton Ellis's 'Cry Tough'/'Dance Crasher', Justin Hinds's 'No Good Rudie', Derrick Morgan's 'Cool Off Rudies'); others celebrated the outlaw style (Desmond Dekker's '007 Shanty Town', Prince Buster's Al Capone persona). Critics and moralists charged that the music romanticized violence, while defenders — and producers like Lee 'Scratch' Perry, who answered Buster's authoritarian 'Judge Dread' — argued the songs documented and even justified youth pushed into crime by a rigged system. The Wailers' 'Simmer Down' is often read as doing both at once: urging restraint while celebrating the toughs. Grounded in Heather Augustyn's skabook 'Real Rude Boys' foundation-ska writing.
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