Derrick Harriott

Derrick Harriott is a Jamaican singer, producer and label owner, leader of the Jiving Juniors before a long solo and production career. During the early-1960s Jamaican soul boom, roughly 1963 to 1964, he fronted a backing band called the Mighty Vikings and used his own record shop and a car to get newly imported American soul singles to his band fast enough to rehearse and perform them almost as quickly as the sound systems exposed them; he describes that Motown, Curtis Mayfield and Otis Redding-influenced soul era as the direct forerunner that eclipsed ska and fed into rocksteady.

He dated the early-1970s wave of "sufferah" protest songs to his own 1970 production of the Kingstonians' "Sufferah", and stressed that many of the young artists making such records were genuinely poor rather than performing hardship for effect, recalling one specific account of a bailiff repossessing a singer's bed between royalty payments.