The electronics men and the birth of 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.

The full-range valve amplifier Hedley Jones designed in 1947 to reproduce the whole audio spectrum; the model Tom Wong acquired and christened a 'Sound System', making it a foundational artifact in the birth of Jamaican dance amplification.

The heart of a sound, and the part that was rarely bought off a shelf. Jamaican sounds ran custom-built valve amplifiers wound and tuned by local engineers — King Tubby among them — because the sound wanted more low end and more level than commercial equipment offered. An amp was a competitive secret as much as a component, and a sound's character was substantially its own.

The economic pressure, high import costs and limited access to foreign gear, that pushed Jamaican and early diaspora builders to make their own amplifiers and instruments, as Hedley Jones did when he could not afford an imported guitar.

Hedley Jones's Kingston record store, where he played jazz and Cuban records through the high-fidelity amplifiers he built in the late 1940s, an early node connecting record retail, electronics and the dawning sound-system culture.

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.

The line running from WWII radar and radio training into Caribbean audio engineering, seen in Hedley Jones's RAF radar service in Glasgow, which returned advanced valve and high-frequency electronics knowledge to Jamaica.

The founding period of Jamaican and UK sound amplification when custom thermionic-valve amplifiers, prized for warmth and headroom, defined the sound of the dance before transistors arrived.

The do-it-yourself ethos, born of scarcity and import costs, in which Jamaican and diaspora sound-builders made their own amplifiers, effects and enclosures rather than buying them, prizing ingenuity over catalogue gear.

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.