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Baudolino
Baudolino
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Possibly the first real reggae record

Posted about 1 year ago
  • Artist:
    Larry & Alvin
  • Album:
    Studio One Presenting Larry Marshall
  • Track:
    Nanny Goat
was "Nanny Goat" by Larry (Marshall) & Alvin (Leslie), from 1968. Larry was the engineer at Studio One, and the man who brought Burning Spear to the studio. The studio had just had a new delay function added when this was recorded
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Comments (28)

  1. Baudolino
    Baudolino says And this is "Musical Scorcher", by Carey Johnson & the Sound Dimension
    Permalink posted 06/03/2008
  2. Baudolino
    Baudolino says And the rhythm was revived in 1993 for Penthouse/VP Records - this is Pam Hall with her digital dancehall cut "Flex Right"
    Permalink posted 06/03/2008
  3. Scotch
    Scotch says Thank you for sharing that moment in history. These posts are incredibly valuable to me.
    Permalink posted 06/03/2008
  4. PopeyePete
    PopeyePete says Great stuff! IRIE MON!!
    Permalink posted 06/03/2008
  5. Marigold
    Marigold says oh yeah. that was sweet. you can't go wrong with studio one. thanks.
    Permalink posted 06/03/2008
  6. Mindful
    Mindful says Definately scorching! Pam Hall brought back memories of the dancehall!!!. She did a version of Never Can Say Goodbye and I Will Always Love You in the mid 90's I believe.
    Permalink posted 06/03/2008
  7. Baudolino
    Baudolino says Inded she did It's buried in the comments *here* http://mog.com/ivylander/blog_post/163789#comments
    Permalink posted 06/03/2008
  8. mollifire
    mollifire says HUGE tune! i didn't realize Nanny Goat was such an early production and thus, so pivotal in creating the skanking reggae sound. All the great crooners sang on this tune - Gregory Isaacs, Johnny Osbourne, Courtney Melody, Terry Ganzie, Sister Nancy and so on. Thanks for sharing the history. I feel blessed every time i stop by your mog page! Much Respect Baudolino!
    Permalink posted 06/04/2008
  9. zarpex
    zarpex says The origins of reggae are actually unusually definite, for a musical genre. I'm a little surprised how seldom they're spoken of. Even the wikipedia entry on the subject skirts the truth - possibly because it might have been embarrassing to reggae fans - and speaks vaguely of Caribbean influences, etc. Know where reggae came from? Back in 1960, a tourist resort in Jamaica (I can't recall its name offhand) was trying to draw more visitors, so they decided to hire a band to entertain the guests. "What sort of music should they play?" someone naturally asked. After some head-scratching, someone said "Well, hear there's this new label in America calle 'Motown' that's quite popular. Let's sound like them!" Excellent idea, everyone agreed. Problem: no one had an actual Motown record to imitate. A few had heard one or two Motown songs in their travels, and as best they could recall, it sounded something like what you hear in Baudolino's red button at the top of this page. And a genre - anthropomorphically wrong, born in the crudest spirit of imitation, raised on a diet of misremembering - began to spread around the world. It took only about ten years for the sweet, naive quality it originally possessed to rigidify into its present form, where the widespread myths regarding its ontogeny are used to prevent people from recognizing, or at least from daring to speak out against, its ugliness, its repetitiveness, or the crude bigotry it champions.
    Permalink posted 06/04/2008
  10. Scotch
    Scotch says Interesting, I'd never heard it like that, zarpex...
    Permalink posted 06/04/2008
  11. Baudolino
    Baudolino says Zarpex - an interesting post, but I have one minor quibble, in respect that every detail in your post is demonstrable tripe. The recording industry in Jamaica began round about 1950, with labels like Stanley Motta's MRS and Chin's, run by Ivan Chin, releasing locally produced mento tunes, which were very like calypso. Round about the same time, Eric Deans andVal Bennett ran jazz big bands, filled with horn players from the Alpha Boys School. Their recordings were produced by Tony Hall and Nixa. All of this is easily verified by a quick gogle search. These bands played regularly in tourist resorts - indeed, in 1989 I saw the Jolly Boys perform, fifty years after their first gigs. There was no shortage of trained musicians playing professionally in the 1950s. Neither jazz nor mento was popular in the ghettoes of downtown Kingston, where American r'n'b records by Amos Milburn, Calvin Boze, Ruth Brown, Wynonie Harris and Louis Jordan ruled the roost. Jamaican sound system owners sourced their records by going to America and bringing them home. By about 1959, the "jump" blues popular in Jamaica was no longer fashionable in the states. Sound systems relied on a regular supply of exclusives that their rivals couldn't play, so in 1958-59 Coxsone Dodd and Duke reid began recording local singers doing US-style r'n'b. However, their horn players had grown up playing jazz or mento, and the records thus accentuated the off-beat more than conventionalr'n'b, ultimately, through the works of Prince Buster in particular, gradually metamorphosing into ska in about 1963. During the hot summer of 1966 dancers began to tire of ska, and producers were less keen to ppay for a ten piece band, so newer young musicians were invited into the studio, where they developed the slower and more deliberate rocksteadybeat. The first reggae records weren't recorded until 1968 at the earliest, so your proposed date of 1960 is preposterous. As for your suggestion that they were trying to "copy" Motown but didn't have the records, artists like Alton Ellis, Winston Francis, the Wailers and the Techniques all regularly covered soul and Motown tunes - for example posted on here is Ken Boothe's cover of "You Keep Me Hanging On" from 1966, predating reggae by two years. In any event, while I've plumped for Studio One here as the first studio to release reggae, there are tenable arguments to be made for Leslie Kong's Beverly's label (The Maytals "Do The Reggay"), Harry J (THe Belltones "No More Heartaches") or Lee Perry with "People Funny Boy" asthe first reggae tune. Effectively, the major development was the use of the organ shuffle - are you *really* going to be able to trace that to Motown? There is no dispute that Jamaican music has nicked from a lot of other musical styles (although you might like to note that JA copyright law was wholly different to US/European copyright law, as Jamaica did not, upon achieving independence, sign up to the Berne Convention, and only did so in 1994). In truth, more of the core rhythms can be traced directly to Mongo Santamaria, Celia Cruz, and Cannonball Adderley than anything on Motown - once again, the evidence for this is readily available. What you call "misremembering" might otherwise be described as "reimagining" - that is, covering a tune in your own style; or are you going to say that EVERY cover should slavishly copy the original? I suspect not. As for its "sweet, naive" quality, I suspect once again that you are unfamiliar with records about the Kennedy assassination in 1963, or the visit of Haile selassie in 1966. Only a cretin would regard the early works of Prince Buster, or the Wailers warnings to the youth not to engage in violence as either "sweet" or "naive"? Championing crude bigotry? Yes, if you look for them, you will find records that are appallingly racist and sexist - nobody denies that. A great many Jamaicans are still living in a culture whose views largely disappeared from bigger urban societies forty or fifty years ago. Mind you, I seem to rtecall that if we apply *that* test, then a fair amount of country music, and some heavy metal, not to mention the Rolling Stones would be thrown into the wheelie bin. I suspect, sir, that you are unfamiliar with Lloyd Bradley's book "Bass Culture". I suggest you read it then return here to eat a very large dose of humble pie.
    Permalink posted 06/04/2008
  12. Baudolino
    Baudolino says Oh, and I forgot - "It all sounds the same", doesn't it? So you honestly wouldn't hear any difference between Count Ossie and the Mystic Revelation of Rastafari, Black Uhuru, and the Heptones? And of course, rock music could never be accused of "repetitiveness", now, could it?
    Permalink posted 06/04/2008
  13. zarpex
    zarpex says Baudolino! You stand your ground with resolute ferocity, and an intimidating array of sources (although few of them, I might humbly suggest, actually falsify what I said). My own source is ??The Lucifer Effect?? by Allan Bloom. If you agree to read it, I will cheerfully read Mr. Bradley's ??Bass Culture??. You are now officially zarpex-Endorsed™.
    Permalink posted 06/04/2008
  14. Marigold
    Marigold says wow. i just got schooled.
    Permalink posted 06/04/2008
  15. Baudolino
    Baudolino says Are you. perhaps, referring to Allan Bloom (1930-1992), the reactionary American philosopher? While I haven't read any of his work, in the Seventies I met a great many of the veterans of early reggae. I can categorically assure you that the term "reggae" was not coined until well after 1960 (there are several possible etymologies, none wholly convincing). There is, frankly, not the remotest possibility, given the way the recording industry worked, and the power of the sound systems, that it could have originated in or near an hotel. The fact that there are four arguable candidates for first reggae record hardly makes its origin "unusually definite" - it's about as proveable as the "First rock'n'roll record" debate. Anyway, why would hotel proprietors want to hire drug-taking Rastafarians from the ghettoes, rather than local boys with proven track records as entertainers (E.g. Byron Lee, Stanley Beckford, or Aston "Peanuts" Davis)?
    Permalink posted 06/04/2008
  16. zarpex
    zarpex says My mistake, Baudolino - there are three Blooms whose works I've read (Howard, Harold, and Allan), and, being an imbecile, I sometimes confuse them. I also confused the title with Philip Zimbardo's ??The Lucifer Effect??. I should have said ??The Lucifer Principle??, by Howard - not Allan - Bloom. My hippocampus may have been in the wrong place, but my heart wasn't. And I do agree that Allan Bloom was a bit of a stick-in-the-mud, but I also sympathize - to some extent - with his argument that more things should be universally recognizable than the ??Flintstones?? theme or "Leave Britney alone!"...
    Permalink posted 06/04/2008
  17. Scotch
    Scotch says Just to interject... MORE things, or deeper things? Having never read Allan Bloom's work, I'm looking for clarification.
    Permalink posted 06/04/2008
  18. zarpex
    zarpex says Both, Scotch. : )
    Permalink posted 06/04/2008
  19. Scotch
    Scotch says Well, good, zarpex. I hoped that you didn't consider "more" as necessarily better. After all, the Jetsons theme and __Chocolate Rain__ (I had to look that one up) are "more", but not "better". *grin* I apologize for the interruption, carry on...
    Permalink posted 06/04/2008
  20. Baudolino
    Baudolino says Zarpex: He's quite the polymath, your Mr Bloom, but having Bob Marley as a client of your PR firm for a couple of years does not you a reggae historian make. Where his observations are contradicted by the musicians quoted in writings of (for example) Stephen Davis, Steve Berrow and Lloyd Bradley, all of whom have been writing on the subject for over thirty years and have met hundreds of singers and players, and thus have access to original source material, where they are at odds with the proven historical record, and where they do not accord with my own interviews with reggae musicians, then I know which evidence I prefer.
    Permalink posted 06/05/2008
  21. zarpex
    zarpex says From your most recent (as of this writing) post, Baudolino, I gather you slept poorly last night, and I infer that you work in the field of law. In consideration of the former, I will disregard the unwarranted hostility of your tone, but a man whose work regularly brings him to court should know to tread very lightly around phrases like "proven historical record." You have your sources, and the "hundreds of singers and players" (whom you just got done portraying as the sort of criminals and undesirables a tourist resort would be unlikely to hire) they've been interviewing for "over thirty years" - the very time since which reggae (or ska, or mento, or sminklefratz, or whatever ludicrous pseudo-distinction suits the purpose of conferring a veneer of scholarly merit on this hogwash) had exhausted its meager supply of novelty, lost every trace of warmth and conviviality it once possessed, and calcified into the single song it might just as well have been all these decades - and I have mine. If it's a question of preference (so much for "proven historical record"), I guess people will just have to choose between the concise, plausible, and funny version that conforms to the natural human abhorrence for reggae music, which I presented in friendly good faith, or the endless tangle of pointless terminological distinctions that people lacking refinement of taste typically employ to shield that truth from themselves and others.
    Permalink posted 06/05/2008
  22. Baudolino
    Baudolino says (sighs) You don’t actually understand the process of gathering evidence, do you? To take an absurd example, if you’re assessing how old the World is, you might take results from scientific studies in the fields of cosmology, geology, chemistry, biology and archaeology, and observe that they all appear to point in broadly the same direction, with some explicable gaps, then note that the Creationist hypothesis appears less than totally supported by the evidence, and draw your own conclusions. In the same way, if (1) the music records in the BBC Music Library indicate that Jamaican releases from 1968 onwards generally employed a faster, jerkier beat than the records of the preceding two years, emphasising the guitar and organ instead of the horn section, and that these records became known as “reggae”, (2) there is no reference in the British Library newspaper archive or those of the Jamaican Daily Gleaner to the word “reggae” prior to 1968, and (3) several dozen different musicians (including some who were regular studio players in the late Sixties) have told several different interviewers, on numerous occasions, in three different continents, that reggae grew up out of rocksteady in the late 1960s, due to a number of recorded economic, musical and cultural factors, against which is arrayed the recollections of one man, based upon one perhaps unspecified source, then it would be open to the impartial judge to prefer the vast body of evidence favouring one hypothesis over the other; this may not be scientifically verifiable, but it satisfies the burden of proof in civil litigation. In describing my sources as “criminals and undesirables”, I suspect that you have once again shown your naivete in respect of the Jamaican class system, which is very much divided into “Uptown” and “Downtown”; in choosing the words I did, I was seeking to satirise the “Uptown” perception of Rasta musicians. Let us not forget that Duke Reid banned any manifestations of Rastafarianism, including dreadlocks and ganja, from his studio altogether. You refer to your “sources” – how many of the musicians of the sixties JA studio era have you met? Did you discuss these matters with them? If not, then in what way are your sources better than information I received directly? Your sentence beginning “You have your sources” is barely comprehensible, and makes a number of statements if fact that are, on the face of it, tendentious. You do not in any way seek to explain when or how the whole of Jamaican music “calcified” into a “single song”, thus making it impossible to rebut your hypothesis. I am frankly surprised at your reference to the “natural human abhorrence” for any form of music, which strikes me as utterly bigoted and offensive. If meant humorously, it missed the mark; if not, it was a comment fit to come from the lips of the Grand Wizard of the KKK. To be frank, ninety per cent of rock music leaves me utterly cold. However, unlike you, when I see a post about someone or some piece of music that is not to my taste, I simply choose to move on and look for something that I might enjoy, rather than appointing myself as some form of taste arbiter. You refer to “truth”. With respect, sir, that is a concept with which you have yet to show any familiarity
    Permalink posted 06/06/2008
  23. Sturgell
    Sturgell says I think I just crapped myself after reading this thread.
    Permalink posted 06/06/2008
  24. Scotch
    Scotch says Uhm, well said, Sturgell. I'm with you, more or less. It's a real gem, this thread.
    Permalink posted 06/06/2008
  25. Petey Lapides
    Petey Lapides says "The 1967 edition of the ??Dictionary of Jamaican English?? lists ??reggae?? as 'a recently estab. sp. for ??rege??', as in ??rege-rege??, a word that can mean either 'rags, ragged clothing' or *'a quarrel, a row'*."
    Permalink posted 06/06/2008
  26. Scotch
    Scotch says So in 1967 "reggae" wasn't considered a musical stylee, or at least description of such. I don't think the genesis of the word is the real argument here, though.
    Permalink posted 06/07/2008
  27. Petey Lapides
    Petey Lapides says Scotch, I don't think the genesis of the word is the real argument, either, although one combatant summarizes the other's argument (inaccurately, I'd say) as an "endless tangle of pointless terminological distinctions" (read: "don't distract me with your 'facts'; shit stinks whatever you call it"). I was just highlighting for my own amusement that we have a "rege-rege" about reggae on our hands here. Haha! (I'd say this was ??ironic??, but that would be misusing the word in the usual way. I think it's just the sort of verbal/conceptual echo found interesting to those who find such things interesting.)
    Permalink posted 06/07/2008
  28. Scotch
    Scotch says Well, put into that context, it is pretty funny. I missed that... All due respect to those involved in the conversation, the way I see it (and I think we're in agreement) is this: on one hand you've got someone who pretty much lived it, and knew those who lived it; on the other, someone who read it in one book.
    Permalink posted 06/07/2008

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