Record shops as reggae infrastructure

"Miss Pat": co-founder with her husband Vincent of Randy's record shop and the Studio 17 room at 17 North Parade, Kingston, and then of VP Records in Queens in 1979 — the V and P are their initials. She helped run the largest independent reggae label in the world for four decades and published a memoir, Miss Pat: My Reggae Music Journey, in 2021.

The downtown Kingston blocks around North Parade that held Randy's Record Mart and its upstairs studio (Studio 17), along with a cluster of shops and distributors. Randy's later became VP Records after the Chin family emigrated — one of the direct lines from the Kingston retail trade to reggae's global distribution.

The recording studio Vincent and Patricia Chin built above their record shop at 17 North Parade, known locally as Studio 17. It opened in 1969 and ran until 1979, and in that decade it recorded Bob Marley, Lee "Scratch" Perry, Peter Tosh, Burning Spear, Alton Ellis, Big Youth, Toots and the Maytals, Dennis Brown and Augustus Pablo, with the Chins' son Clive Chin producing there from the early 1970s. Shop below, studio above, in the same building on the same street as the competition — the arrangement that made the North Parade block work. Its surviving tapes became the subject of the documentary Studio 17: The Lost Reggae Tapes.

Vincent "Randy" Chin (1937-2003) was a Chinese-Jamaican entrepreneur who founded Randy's Records and, above his North Parade shop, the influential Randy's Studio 17, a hub of early-1970s reggae where artists such as Bob Marley, Augustus Pablo, Gregory Isaacs and Burning Spear recorded. With his wife Patricia he later relocated to New York, opening VP Records (named for Vincent and Patricia) in Queens in 1979, which grew into the world's largest independent distributor of Caribbean music.

The Half Way Tree record shop and label run by the Chin brothers, and one of the key retail and production hubs of the 1970s and 80s uptown scene — a shop that also pressed and produced, in the pattern common to the Jamaican trade.

In Jamaica the shop counter did the job a label's A&R department does elsewhere. Shopkeepers heard what people asked for, what sold out and what stayed on the shelf, and many of them started producing on the strength of it — Randy's, Aquarius and Rockers all worked this way. The distance between knowing what the public wanted and making it was one room.

The record shop Vincent "Randy" Chin and his wife Patricia opened in 1958, selling used jukebox 45s from a small shop on the corner of East Street and Tower Street in downtown Kingston and named after Randy's Records of Gallatin, Tennessee. It moved to North Parade around 1960 and in 1962 into a former ice-cream parlour at 16-17 North Parade, where it became one of Jamaica's leading retail outlets and, with the studio the Chins built above it, the commercial and creative centre of the North Parade record district. The Chins left for New York in 1977 and opened VP Records — Vincent and Patricia — in Queens; the 17 North Parade name survives as VP's reissue imprint.

Joel Gibson's record shop and business base, and the retail face of one of the most productive production operations of the 1970s. Gibbs' work with engineer Errol Thompson — the "Mighty Two" — ran across roots, dub and deejay records, including Dennis Brown's strongest run.

The economic loop the music ran on: producers cut 45s to feed sound systems, sounds broke the tunes in the dance, the dance sold the records, and the records financed the next session. Radio sat largely outside this circuit, which is why what mattered in the dance and what charted on the air could be different musics entirely.

Augustus Pablo's record shop at 135 Orange Street, Kingston, and the retail face of his Rockers International label — the oldest surviving record shop on the strip and a destination for collectors of roots, rocksteady and dancehall vinyl from around the world. Shops like it were not only outlets but filters and meeting points: where a producer sold his own pressings, where selectors heard what was new, and where a record's reputation was made. Pablo founded it with his brother Garth Swaby to sell the family's own productions, and it is kept today by his son Addis Pablo with Ainsworth "Mitchie" Williams behind the counter. The founding year is unsettled — the archive's editor gives 1976, LargeUp 1978 and The Vinyl Factory 1979 — and no start date is recorded here until a source close to the shop settles it. The address had music in it before Rockers arrived: 135-135A Orange Street was Leslie Kong's Beverley's, record shop and ice-cream parlour, until his death in 1971.

A few downtown blocks pressed, sold and clashed the whole music into being.

In Jamaica and the diaspora, the retail counter was the A&R department.

From ska instrumentals to modern dancehall, a cluster of Chinese-Jamaican entrepreneurs ran the shops, studios and labels at the centre of the music.

Producers, executives and one dancer whose stand-off with a promoter opened a stage to Rastafarian drumming -- the women who ran the business side of Jamaican music.