Arthur "Duke" Reid

Arthur "Duke" Reid (21 July 1915 - January 1975) served ten years as a Jamaican police officer before leaving the force to help his wife Lucille run the family business, the Treasure Isle Grocery and Liquor Store at 33 Bond Street in Kingston — and it is worth pausing on that sequence, because almost everything he became grew out of a shop.

The sound system he ran through the 1950s was among the island's most popular, and the name he took for himself, the Trojan, is generally traced to the British-built trucks that carried his equipment. He contested the late-1950s dances with Coxsone's Downbeat, and was crowned King of Sounds and Blues three years running.

He built the studio above the store, and named the label after it: Treasure Isle. What came out of that room defined rocksteady — cool, unhurried, elegantly arranged — through Alton Ellis and the Flames, the Techniques, the Paragons, Justin Hinds and the Dominoes, Stranger Cole, the Jamaicans, the Melodians and Phyllis Dillon.

Then, at the turn of the 1970s, he did the thing that mattered most for everything after: he opened his own rocksteady rhythms to the toasting of U-Roy and Dennis Alcapone, and in doing so helped invent the deejay record. He performed the part as well, presiding over toasting contests in an ermine cloak with a gilt crown. He died in January 1975, having sold Treasure Isle to Sonia Pottinger the year before.