King Stitt

Winston 'King Stitt' Sparkes (1940-2012), 'The Ugly One', succeeded Count Machuki as deejay on Coxsone Dodd's Downbeat sound and cut early deejay sides including 'Fire Corner' (1969) with Clancy Eccles — a direct bridge from sound-system chatting to recorded toasting. He died in late January 2012, aged 71; no cause was given. Contemporary accounts place him with Count Machuki and U-Roy as the pioneers of the Jamaican deejay style, and credit his later run for Clancy Eccles — "Fire Corner" and "Herbman Shuffle" — as the bridge from sound-system chatting to records. Corroborated against United Reggae's obituary.

Two details are worth keeping straight about the name. Donna Hope records that the moniker "the Ugly One" came from his facial malformation — it was his own, unsentimental description of himself, not a stage conceit — and Stitt built a persona around it, opening records in the spaghetti-western badman register, casting himself as Lee Van Cleef and calling listeners out to "the big gundown". That is worth noting because it puts the gun-and-badman posture in Jamaican records at the very beginning of the deejay tradition, decades before it became the thing people argue about, and it arrived through Hollywood rather than through the yard.