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Toasting and the mic

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How the sound-system deejay's live talk-over became recorded art.

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In short

From Count Machuki to U-Roy and Big Youth, the deejay's mic style moved from the dance onto record and reshaped popular music.

The fuller picture

Toasting grew directly out of Jamaica's sound-system culture, where a selector's spoken commentary over the records kept the crowd moving. Count Machuki (Winston Cooper), working sound systems in the late 1950s, is widely credited as the first deejay to make that talk-over a real performance - drawing on American radio DJ patter and jive talk to hype records live. The style stayed mostly a dancehall-only skill until 1970, when U-Roy released "Wake the Town," produced by Duke Reid and King Tubby: it made him a chart star in his own right, with three songs in the Jamaican Top 10 at once, and proved a deejay's chanted rhymes could carry a record like a singer's lyrics. Through the 1970s, deejays including I-Roy, Prince Jazzbo and Big Youth pushed the style further, adding Rasta-influenced lyrics and a deeper, bass-heavy delivery - a lineage that runs in a straight line to reggae toasting's role in the birth of hip-hop.

What the sources say

Toasting lineage: Wikipedia; jamaicanlifeandtravel.com on Count Machuki; Wax Poetics on U-Roy. "Father of deejaying" is a contested title across several pioneers (Machuki, King Stitt, U-Roy) - treated here as a lineage, not a single-inventor claim.

discusses · person · Well supportedU-Roy

Ewart Beckford (1942-2021), the deejay who made toasting a recorded form. He had been talking over records on the sound systems for years — with Dickie Dynamic, Sir George the Atomic, and most importantly on Coxsone Dodd's Downbeat — when Duke Reid put him on the Treasure Isle rocksteady rhythms in 1970. The results took over the Jamaican charts, at one point reportedly holding the top three positions at once with "Wake the Town", "Rule the Nation" and "Wear You to the Ball", and the album Version Galore made the form permanent. What he established was that a deejay's voice over an existing rhythm was a record in its own right, not a novelty: everything from Jamaican deejaying to rap descends in part from those sessions. He ran his own Stur-Gav Hi-Fi from the late 1970s, the sound that gave Josey Wales and Charlie Chaplin their start, and recorded into his final years. He was awarded the Order of Distinction and died on 17 February 2021.

discusses · person · Well supportedBig Youth

Big Youth (Manley Augustus Buchanan, born 19 April 1949) is a Jamaican deejay and toaster who became one of the most influential vocalists of 1970s roots reggae, known for a melodic, chanting, Rastafari-infused style. His 1973 debut album Screaming Target, produced by Gussie Clarke, set the benchmark for deejay albums and helped transform the deejay from party hype-man into a serious social and spiritual voice. He ranks alongside U-Roy, I-Roy and Dennis Alcapone among the foundational toasters whose approach influenced later dancehall and hip-hop.

discusses · person · Well supportedCount Machuki

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.

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