Ken Khouri

Kenneth Lloyd Khouri (1917-2003), a Lebanese-Jamaican entrepreneur regarded as the father of Jamaica's recording industry. He bought secondhand recording equipment in 1949 and ran it from his own house until the stream of people turning up at all hours to cut a song drove him out to a nightclub in St Andrew, then to his King Street furniture store, Times Furniture, where he launched the Times label.

By 1954 he had imported two record presses from America and gone into partnership with his brother Richard as Records Limited, which struck a licensing deal with Mercury Records for the American label's Jamaican releases; that pressing plant became the island's first indigenous record-making facility. In 1957 he opened Federal Records on Marcus Garvey Drive, the first full recording studio in Jamaica, later sold to Tuff Gong in 1981.

Unlike the ghetto sound men he pressed for, Khouri and men like him were uptown businessmen who rented out studio time rather than shaped the music, though he was noted, more than most of his peers, as sympathetic to the sound-system operators' efforts.