Wake the Town: Duke Reid's rocksteady and the birth of the deejay record

U-Roy's second 1970 Treasure Isle hit for Arthur "Duke" Reid, toasting over the Paragons' rocksteady rhythm; with "Wake the Town" it gave U-Roy multiple simultaneous chart entries and cemented the toasting record.

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.

The Paragons were a Jamaican rocksteady vocal trio, led by John Holt, best known for "The Tide Is High" (1967), produced by Duke Reid for his Treasure Isle label. The song became an international standard well beyond reggae after Blondie's 1980 cover topped both the US and UK charts, and it returned to UK number one again in 2002 in a version by Atomic Kitten.

Foundational rocksteady rhythm cut at Treasure Isle for producer Arthur "Duke" Reid, first heard under Alton Ellis's 1966 vocal (often cited among the earliest rocksteady sides) and later the backing track U-Roy toasted over for "Wake the Town" (1970), one of the records that launched deejay culture.

John Holt (John Kenneth Holt, 1947-2014) was a Jamaican singer who first found fame as lead vocalist of the rocksteady vocal group The Paragons, for whom he wrote "The Tide Is High" (later a hit for Blondie), recorded for Duke Reid's Treasure Isle label in the late 1960s. He launched a hugely successful solo career, cutting the album A Love I Can Feel for Studio One and later the popular 1000 Volts of Holt, and remained a fixture of Jamaican music until his death. He died on the evening of 19 October 2014 in a London hospital, aged 69, after a period of illness, having toured and performed almost until the end. Among his later peaks was "Police in Helicopter" for Henry "Junjo" Lawes.

Alton Ellis was a Jamaican singer closely associated with the birth of rocksteady - his own song "Rocksteady" (1966) is one source of the genre's name - recording for both Coxsone Dodd's Studio One and Duke Reid's Treasure Isle. His ballad "I'm Still in Love," released in 1967, became one of the most repeatedly re-voiced and sampled rhythms in Jamaican music, covered and versioned across reggae and dancehall for decades after. He was admitted to hospital at the end of 2007 for treatment of cancer of the lymph glands and died of it in October 2008; rumours of his death had circulated days earlier and been dispelled by his family before it was confirmed. Born in Kingston in 1944, he began in the late 1950s in the duo Alton & Eddie before recording for Duke Reid at Treasure Isle alongside the Flames, his brother Leslie Ellis, David "Baby G" Gordon and Winston Jarrett. He was inducted into the International Reggae & World Music Awards Hall of Fame in 2006. The obituary is dated Saturday 11 October 2008 and says he died "this morning"; no second source fixes the exact day.

Arthur "Duke" Reid's studio above his liquor store at 33 Bond Street, Kingston, and the label of the same name. If Studio One owned ska, Treasure Isle owned rocksteady: from 1966 Reid's productions with Alton Ellis, the Techniques, the Paragons, Phyllis Dillon and John Holt defined the slower, sweeter, bass-forward form, and those rhythms became a second foundation catalogue — the basis of countless later versions, not least through U-Roy toasting over them in 1970. Melodians singer Brent Dowe recalled Duke Reid running an unusually hands-on studio: a speaker wired through to his liquor-store office let him monitor every take while doing other business, and he would reportedly run upstairs shouting corrections the moment something sounded wrong. Dowe also credited Reid as first to deliberately lengthen recordings once rocksteady's slower tempo allowed it, from roughly 2:20 ska cuts to three- or four-minute rocksteady tracks. A between-takes tape fragment on the compilation "Ska after Ska after Ska", titled "Duke Speaks", preserves Reid's own voice mid-session demanding "plenty more bass and drum".

U-Roy's 1970 debut for Arthur "Duke" Reid on Treasure Isle, toasted in one take over the "Girl I've Got a Date" rhythm; a Jamaican number one that helped establish the deejay/toasting record and modern deejay culture.

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.