Drums they didn't want on air

The Mystic Revelation of Rastafari, the drumming-and-horns collective led by master drummer Count Ossie with saxophonist Cedric "Im" Brooks, whose 1973 triple album Grounation brought Rastafari Nyabinghi ceremony to record and to a wider public.

The Rastafari ceremonial gathering and the hand-drumming that carries it — bass, funde and repeater in interlocking parts, with chanting that runs through the night. Nyabinghi is worship rather than entertainment, and it supplies the rhythmic and spiritual foundation that surfaced in roots reggae through Count Ossie and the Mystic Revelation of Rastafari, and through every roots singer who drew on the tradition.

The April 1963 Coral Gardens incident in St James, remembered by Rastafari as "Bad Friday": in the year after independence, Jamaican security forces detained large numbers of Rastafari amid a violent clash, an episode later chronicled in the documentary Bad Friday and, in 2017, the subject of an official government apology. It framed the colonial-era climate in which Rasta imagery and sound were treated as dangerous.

Burru, an African-derived Kingston hand-drumming tradition carried in yards and at Christmas masquerade, which fed directly into Rastafari Nyabinghi drumming through Count Ossie's Wareika Hills camp and shaped the pulse of later Jamaican music.

The Jamaica Broadcasting Corporation, the state broadcaster founded in 1959 in the run-up to independence, and for three decades the place where the argument over Jamaican music on Jamaican radio was actually fought. Its Teenage Dance Party helped break local records and the local share of its playlist rose sharply through the 1960s, though lyric vetting continued throughout. Two presenters changed what the dial sounded like from inside it: Mikey Dread, whose after-midnight Dread at the Controls made the graveyard shift the most listened-to slot on radio by playing dub, and Barry G, whose Saturday-night Boogie Down and weekday Two to Six Supermix took JBC past RJR in listenership for the first time. Both eventually left — Dread in 1979 against internal resistance to reggae, Barry G to RJR in 1987. JBC's television service was sold in 1997 and became TVJ.

Public record: documented histories record that Jamaican authorities and political parties kept a number of popular songs off the radio for political content, including the 1964 ska record 'Carry Go Bring Come' and, around the 1972 general election, reggae songs such as The Wailers' 'Small Axe' (academic and press accounts, incl. 'Reggae, Rastafari, and the Rhetoric of Social Control').

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.

Oswald Williams (c. 1926-1976), the drummer who brought Rastafari into Jamaican popular music. From his camp in the Wareika Hills above Kingston he taught the akete drumming that became nyabinghi, and his drums on the Folkes Brothers' "Oh Carolina" in 1960 are usually described as the first time that sound reached a commercial record. With the Mystic Revelation of Rastafari he made Grounation, a triple album of drumming, chanting and jazz horns that stands as the fullest document of the tradition.

Grounation (1973), the landmark triple album by Count Ossie & the Mystic Revelation of Rastafari that put a full Rastafari drumming-and-chanting ceremony, including a version of "Oh Carolina" and a 30-minute title suite, onto record.

Verena Reckord, Jamaican music journalist and scholar whose writing on Rastafarian drumming, tracing burru and Kumina roots through Count Ossie into Nyabinghi and reggae, is a key source on the music the colonial airwaves once shunned.

The Wareika Hills, on the eastern edge of Kingston, site of the Rastafari camp where Count Ossie gathered drummers in the 1950s and where burru and Kumina rhythms were forged into Nyabinghi — a cradle of the drumming that entered Jamaican records via "Oh Carolina.".

"Oh Carolina," recorded by the Folkes Brothers in 1960 and produced by Prince Buster, is built on Count Ossie's Nyabinghi drumming - a rare case of Rastafari ceremonial drums appearing directly on a commercial Jamaican pop record, years before that influence became widely recognized in reggae history.