The Downbeat and the Trojan: How Two Kingston Rivals Built the Sound System

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.

Clement Seymour Dodd (1932-2004), sound-system operator, producer and founder of Studio One. He came up running the Downbeat sound in the 1950s, in direct rivalry with Duke Reid, importing American R&B and scratching the labels off so rivals could not identify what he was playing. From 1963 he built at 13 Brentford Road the studio that gave first recordings to a remarkable share of Jamaican music's canon — The Wailers, Burning Spear, Alton Ellis, Marcia Griffiths, Dennis Brown, Horace Andy, John Holt — and it is widely described as the first recording studio in Jamaica owned by a Black Jamaican, a claim repeated often enough to be worth attributing rather than stating flatly. The house bands he assembled, the Skatalites and later Sound Dimension, cut rhythms that have been versioned continuously for sixty years, which is why the label is so often called the Motown of Jamaica. He moved his base to New York in the 1980s while the catalogue kept working without him. He died on 4 May 2004, days after the stretch of Brentford Road outside the studio was renamed Studio One Boulevard in his honour.

Clement "Coxsone" Dodd's studio and label at 13 Brentford Road, Kingston — the closest thing Jamaican music has to a foundation. From 1963 onward it moved through ska, rocksteady and early reggae, and the rhythms cut in its rooms became the raw material for everything after: the Studio One catalogue is versioned, toasted over and sampled to this day, and a working knowledge of it is effectively a working knowledge of the music. Its house bands (the Skatalites, later Sound Dimension) and its roll of first recordings — The Wailers, Alton Ellis, Burning Spear, Dennis Brown, Marcia Griffiths, Horace Andy and many more — make it the single most connected node in this archive. Officially the Jamaican Recording and Publishing Studio, it was built out of a former nightclub at 13 Brentford Road in Cross Roads, which Dodd acquired in 1962 and converted with his father's help — the first Black-owned recording studio in Jamaica. The address served as studio, label headquarters and shopfront at once, which is what earned it the "Motown of Jamaica" comparison. Days before Dodd's death in May 2004 the Jamaican government renamed Brentford Road as Studio One Boulevard.

Cecil Bustamante Campbell (24 May 1938 - 8 September 2016) came up working for Coxsone Dodd's sound — as security, handling money, sourcing records, then selecting — before building his own, Voice of the People, which within a short time was a genuine rival to both Coxsone and Duke Reid. That progression is the whole apprenticeship system in one career. In 1961 he produced the Folkes Brothers' "Oh Carolina" on his Wild Bells label, with Count Ossie's drummers on it, putting Rastafari percussion onto a commercial Jamaican record for the first time; it was licensed to Blue Beat in Britain, the label that became synonymous with 1960s ska. "Madness" (1963), "One Step Beyond" (1964) and "Al Capone" — which reached number 18 in Britain in 1967 — followed, along with the Judge Dread records and a long, partly staged feud with Derrick Morgan. He met Muhammad Ali in 1964 and joined the Nation of Islam, later issuing records on an Islam imprint. The ska revival a decade after his peak took its name and much of its manner from him: Madness named themselves for his record and made their debut single a tribute, and the Specials covered him. He died in Miami. The date of "Oh Carolina" is unsettled: 1960 and 1961 both circulate, and the reference works give 1961. Buster described how pre-independence radio payola worked against sound-system-affiliated producers: stations required "requests" to justify airplay, but with a glut of American singles to get through, and staff reportedly on record-company retainers, local producers had no realistic way to compete for airtime. In the mid-1960s the American label King Records, prompted by James Brown after he discovered Buster's music on a Jamaica trip, sought the US rights to Buster's catalogue; the deal collapsed over publishing terms, which Buster, by then an outspoken Nation of Islam figure, believed was no accident. In 1967 Philips gave his "Ten Commandments of Man" a US release that debuted at number 35 on the Cashbox chart.

Clement Dodd's sound system, and the dominant set of the late 1950s. Downbeat's rivalry with Duke Reid the Trojan is the founding contest of Jamaican sound-system culture — fought with exclusive American R&B pressings, then with Dodd's own recordings once he began producing to feed the sound. Studio One grew directly out of that need.

Arthur Reid's sound system, named for the Trojan truck it travelled on, and Coxsone Downbeat's great rival through the late 1950s. Reid was a former policeman who ran the sound with a well-documented showmanship, and like Dodd he moved into producing to supply it — the path that led to Treasure Isle and the rocksteady catalogue. As late as 1963 Reid was still an R&B loyalist, contemptuous of the new ska beat as a passing fad, and preferred running imported American records to paying for further sessions; attendance at his dances thinned during that stretch, which is credited with pushing him to finally commit to the style. Once he did, he produced some of ska's strongest work behind the Skatalites and singers including Slim Smith, Justin Hinds, Alton Ellis and Stranger Cole, and was the ska producer most inclined toward Jamaica's older mento tradition.

Winston 'Count Machuki' Cooper (1939-1995) is regarded as Jamaica's first deejay: he began chatting live jive over records on Tom the Great Sebastian's sound in the early 1950s and later became the voice of Coxsone Dodd's Downbeat, directly inspiring U-Roy and the toasting tradition.

A one-off acetate cut for a single sound system — originally a test pressing, then the core weapon of clash culture. A sound commissions an artist to voice a custom version of a known tune naming that sound, and plays it as an exclusive nobody else can answer. The dubplate turns a record into a possession, and its economy sustains a whole layer of the business.

Arthur "Duke" Reid's studio above his liquor store at 33 Bond Street, Kingston, and the label of the same name. If Studio One owned ska, Treasure Isle owned rocksteady: from 1966 Reid's productions with Alton Ellis, the Techniques, the Paragons, Phyllis Dillon and John Holt defined the slower, sweeter, bass-forward form, and those rhythms became a second foundation catalogue — the basis of countless later versions, not least through U-Roy toasting over them in 1970. Melodians singer Brent Dowe recalled Duke Reid running an unusually hands-on studio: a speaker wired through to his liquor-store office let him monitor every take while doing other business, and he would reportedly run upstairs shouting corrections the moment something sounded wrong. Dowe also credited Reid as first to deliberately lengthen recordings once rocksteady's slower tempo allowed it, from roughly 2:20 ska cuts to three- or four-minute rocksteady tracks. A between-takes tape fragment on the compilation "Ska after Ska after Ska", titled "Duke Speaks", preserves Reid's own voice mid-session demanding "plenty more bass and drum".

Arthur "Duke" Reid (21 July 1915 - January 1975) served ten years as a Jamaican police officer before leaving the force to help his wife Lucille run the family business, the Treasure Isle Grocery and Liquor Store at 33 Bond Street in Kingston — and it is worth pausing on that sequence, because almost everything he became grew out of a shop. The sound system he ran through the 1950s was among the island's most popular, and the name he took for himself, the Trojan, is generally traced to the British-built trucks that carried his equipment. He contested the late-1950s dances with Coxsone's Downbeat, and was crowned King of Sounds and Blues three years running. He built the studio above the store, and named the label after it: Treasure Isle. What came out of that room defined rocksteady — cool, unhurried, elegantly arranged — through Alton Ellis and the Flames, the Techniques, the Paragons, Justin Hinds and the Dominoes, Stranger Cole, the Jamaicans, the Melodians and Phyllis Dillon. Then, at the turn of the 1970s, he did the thing that mattered most for everything after: he opened his own rocksteady rhythms to the toasting of U-Roy and Dennis Alcapone, and in doing so helped invent the deejay record. He performed the part as well, presiding over toasting contests in an ermine cloak with a gilt crown. He died in January 1975, having sold Treasure Isle to Sonia Pottinger the year before.