House of Joy: the cabinet that built a nation's bass

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.

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.

The role of the builder who designs and constructs the speaker boxes of a sound system, often a carpenter by background; a largely uncredited craftsperson whose cabinet choices shape a rig's low end as much as any record does.

The sound system's architecture: purpose-built cabinets — bass scoops, mid-range "houses of joy", tweeter horns — designed and joined by hand so a set could move air no shop-bought speaker approached. Box-building is a craft lineage of its own, and a sound's stack remains its visible signature.

The large speaker-cabinet stack credited to engineer Hedley Jones in late-1940s Kingston, remembered under the name "House of Joy" and regarded as a prototype for the sound-system speaker set. Built to reproduce a full audio spectrum rather than a public-address voice.

Jamaican audio engineer, musician, inventor and trade unionist (1917-2017) whose 1947 hand-built high-fidelity amplifier, made to play records outside his Bop City shop in Kingston, became the template for the sound system; he supplied amplifiers to Tom Wong, Duke Reid and Coxsone Dodd, built an early solid-body electric guitar, and received the Gold Musgrave Medal in 2011.

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.

The wardrobe-sized bass enclosure that formed the ground layer of early Jamaican and diaspora speaker stacks, with mid-range boxes and tweeters set above it. Named for its furniture-like bulk and hauled to each dance by hand.

In 1950s Kingston, Coxsone Dodd's Downbeat and Duke Reid's Trojan turned rival dances into the foundation of an entire music industry.

How fenced yards, imported 78s and crowned sound men turned 1950s Kingston dances into an industry.

Before there were selectors and deejays, there was the amplifier, and the men who built it.

From a 1947 shop-front amplifier to King Tubby's workshop, engineers built the sound system before anyone sang through it.