Dancehall's Political Patronage

Orville Richard Burrell, born in Kingston on 22 October 1968 and raised from eighteen in Brooklyn, took the name Shaggy from the Scooby-Doo character his friends thought he resembled. He enlisted in the United States Marine Corps in April 1988, served as a field artillery cannon crewman with the 10th Marine Regiment through the Persian Gulf War, and was discharged in 1992 as a lance corporal — he has said the gruff, barked baritone that became his signature was worked out in that period. "Oh Carolina" in 1993, a dancehall remake of the Folkes Brothers record, put him on international charts; "Boombastic" followed in 1995 and won Best Reggae Album at the Grammys the next year. Virgin dropped him in 1999. Hot Shot arrived in 2000 with "It Wasn't Me" and "Angel" and became the first dancehall album to top the Billboard 200 — a commercial position no Jamaican record had reached before. A second Grammy came in 2019 for 44/876, made with Sting.

A Matthews Lane political strongman who, alongside Donald "Zekes" Phipps, supported ambitious youth in the area, including the future artist manager Robert Livingstone.

Kingston producer (born 1956) whose Power House label built a cornerstone of 1980s dancehall on Sly & Robbie riddims, cut at Dynamic Sounds - hits included Half Pint's 'Greetings', Barrington Levy's 'Money Move' and Sugar Minott's 'Buy Off the Bar'. Also billed George "Peppa" Phang, he and area don Tony Welch promoted many of Arnett Gardens's major dances together in the 1980s, part of the neighbourhood's PNP-aligned patronage structure around the sound system Socialist Roots.: 8-15.).

A PNP-affiliated figure in Arnett Gardens, nicknamed after the American television series Starsky and Hutch, who gave the deejay Yellowman his first chance on the microphone — an intervention Yellowman has credited with launching his career, at a time when Yellowman's albinism drew scorn that otherwise limited his opportunities.

Ewart Beckford (1942-2021), the deejay who made toasting a recorded form. He had been talking over records on the sound systems for years — with Dickie Dynamic, Sir George the Atomic, and most importantly on Coxsone Dodd's Downbeat — when Duke Reid put him on the Treasure Isle rocksteady rhythms in 1970. The results took over the Jamaican charts, at one point reportedly holding the top three positions at once with "Wake the Town", "Rule the Nation" and "Wear You to the Ball", and the album Version Galore made the form permanent. What he established was that a deejay's voice over an existing rhythm was a record in its own right, not a novelty: everything from Jamaican deejaying to rap descends in part from those sessions. He ran his own Stur-Gav Hi-Fi from the late 1970s, the sound that gave Josey Wales and Charlie Chaplin their start, and recorded into his final years. He was awarded the Order of Distinction and died on 17 February 2021.

William Maragh, billed the Wild Apache, born in the Cockburn Pen area of Kingston also known as Seivright Gardens, of Jamaican and Indian descent. His debut album Si Boops Deh! in 1985 carried "Boops" — the word entering Jamaican speech for a man who keeps a younger woman — and established a delivery that was faster, more rhythmically intricate and more melodically inventive than most of what surrounded it. Don Dada in 1992 took him to a US major and into the New York hip-hop orbit, where he worked with the Notorious B.I.G., Heavy D and Puff Daddy, and made him one of the handful of Jamaican deejays American rap treated as a peer rather than a novelty. He has recorded sparingly since.

Dennis Howard's Jamaica Journal essay arguing that dancehall's gangster-and-gun content is not purely metaphorical role-play, as Carolyn Cooper and Donna Hope have proposed, but is entangled with real political patronage: sound systems and artists aligned with the PNP or the JLP through area dons, each side keeping its own anthemic songs, with entertainers granted a "partisan immunity" that let them move between rival garrisons. Documents named, settled cases: Tony Welch's PNP-aligned Socialist Roots sound in Arnett Gardens; King Stur Gav's implicit JLP alignment; and the political geography of King Tubby's and King Jammy's Waterhouse/Tower Hill studios.

Tony Welch bought and renamed his sound in 1976 and ran it as an explicitly political set aligned with the PNP through the violent late-1970s election period, one of the clearest cases of sound-system culture entangled with party politics. Welch and George "Peppa" Phang, who ran the Power House label, together promoted many of the area's major dances in the 1980s.: 8-15.).

Winston Foster, born in Kingston on 15 January 1956, was abandoned as a child and raised at Maxfield Children's Home and Alpha Boys School. He had albinism, which in the Jamaica of his childhood meant open rejection, and he built the whole act on it — Yellowman, the name and the joke, taken up before anyone else could use it against him. He came second in the Tastee Talent Contest in 1978 and won it in 1979, worked the dances with Aces International, and by the early 1980s was the most popular deejay in Jamaica. In 1981 he became the first dancehall artist signed to a major American label, Columbia; roughly twenty albums followed in that decade alone, including Mister Yellowman (1982) and Zungguzungguguzungguzeng (1983), whose hook has been quoted by rappers for forty years. The 1984 Columbia record failed when the label pushed R&B and disco at him and he went back to his own sound. Skin cancer was diagnosed in 1982 and spread to his jaw; surgery between 1984 and 1986 permanently altered his face, and he returned to performing in 1987. Yellowman has said it was Starky, a PNP-affiliated Arnett Gardens figure, who ensured he got his chance on the microphone, at a time his albinism otherwise limited his opportunities.

A Matthews Lane political strongman who, with Glenford "Early Bird" Phipps, supported and encouraged ambitious youth in the area — including a young Robert Livingstone, who credits their backing for his start in artist management. Livingstone later invited Zekes on stage during a Buju Banton performance at Eastfest 2003, and Zekes was later a recipient of a platinum plaque at a party for the manager's client Shaggy.

King Stur Gav Hi-Fi, co-founded by U-Roy, was a foundational sound system for late-1970s and 1980s deejay culture, with surviving live dance tapes serving as some of the best-documented recordings of that era's sound-system performance style. Located in an area aligned with the JLP, the sound was implicitly seen as a JLP set; deejays associated with it, including Josie Wales and U-Roy himself, have been perceived as directly aligned with the party.

Socialist Roots was a 1970s Jamaican sound system remembered mainly through deejay Ranking Trevor's own account of his early career, part of the roots-to-dancehall transition period's sound-system scene. Steve Barrow gives it a fuller history, drawn from years around U-Brown and U-Roy, who were there. Socialist Roots was originally King Attorney, and was sold to Tony Welch, a PNP activist who wanted to keep dances — which is how a sound acquires a party rather than a politics. Barrow's wider point is that this was not unusual by the mid-1970s: as the world economic crisis bit and Rasta rose, certain sounds played only for certain parties, and a dance became a place to show your allegiance. His description of how you showed it is the detail worth keeping: you licked off two shot for the PNP man or the JLP man. He calls the result social theatre, which is exactly right — the dance where you could forget your troubles, so long as you did not forget your politics.

Lloyd James, the engineer and producer who came up under King Tubby in Waterhouse and then changed the music twice over. He built and ran his own sound before turning to production, and in 1985 issued "Under Mi Sleng Teng" — the Casio-preset rhythm that ended the live-band era and opened the digital one. Through the late 1980s his Waterhouse studio was the busiest room in Jamaica, cutting for Half Pint, Admiral Bailey, Chaka Demus, Ninjaman and most of the era's voices, and his Super Power sound carried the same material into the dance.

Osbourne Ruddock (1941-1989), the Waterhouse electronics engineer who invented dub. He built and repaired amplifiers, ran his own Hometown Hi-Fi sound, and began cutting versions with parts dropping in and out, drenched in reverb and delay worked live at the controls — first as exclusive plates for his own dances, then as a form in its own right. He trained Scientist, Prince Jammy and others, and his approach to the mixing desk as an instrument reshaped record production worldwide. He was shot dead outside his home in 1989. Per the engineer and broadcaster Mikey Dread, who apprenticed under him, Tubby built his first echo unit himself from two old tape recorders and constructed custom pressure-sensitive, spring-loaded switches for triggering sound effects, so that striking them harder or softer varied the result. Dread also credited a Tubby-built high-pass filter, applied to the snare and hi-hat, with producing the splashy "flying cymbal" sound heard on Bunny Lee and Johnnie Clarke productions such as "No Man Can Escape His Judgement" and "Jah Jah in Deh in Deh".