Tom the Great Sebastian

Tom Wong's sound, and by common account the first of the great Jamaican sound systems. A Chinese-Jamaican hardware merchant, Wong ran it in downtown Kingston from the late 1940s, and its reputation for equipment and for records nobody else had set the terms every sound after it competed on. Duke Reid and Coxsone both came up in its shadow.

Count Machuki's deejay career began as a dancer at Tom Wong's Luke Lane set in the 1950s, where his energetic footwork drew its own following before he was promoted to selector and began developing his chatting style. When Wong later moved to an uptown residency at the Silver Slipper club, he pointedly left Machuki behind, apparently judging a street-style "scatting" deejay too downmarket for that more genteel venue, the snub that sent Machuki to Coxsone Dodd's Downbeat instead.