In Search of the Black Fantastic: Politics and Popular Culture in the Post-Civil Rights Era (Transgressing Boundaries: Studies in Black Politics and Black Communities) by Richard Iton

Author:Richard Iton
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2008-05-06T04:00:00+00:00

“PLAY I ON THE R & B”

In an attempt to develop an export market for Jamaican culture, and to encourage tourism, Edward Seaga, as Jamaica’s minister of development and welfare, had organized a presentation of ska musicians for the 1964 World’s Fair in New York City. The Boston-born, Harvard-trained anthropologist had previously collected tapes of early Jamaican folksingers as part of his research; he owned a record label, W.I.R.L. (West Indies Records Limited), which he sold—to Byron Lee, who renamed it Dynamic Records—after he entered politics as a JLP member of parliament in 1959 (representing West Kingston). In other words, he was hardly a stranger to Jamaican music or the intricacies of Caribbean culture. There was some debate, though, about Seaga’s choices to represent ska and Jamaica at the 1964 exposition. Millie Small, who had had an international hit with “My Boy Lollipop,” was featured, as were Prince Buster (who knew Seaga from his days as a music producer) and Jimmy Cliff. The Wailers, who were by that point Jamaica’s most popular singing group, were rejected as inappropriate for the mission. In particular, Seaga’s choice of Byron Lee’s Dragonaires as the backing band for the show, instead of the more proficient and representative Skatalites, was criticized. “Seaga was thinking like a businessman,” suggests Jimmy Cliff, “not an artistic person. If he wanted to promote the music, he should have got the people who were creating it. The singers were good, but Byron Lee’s backing didn’t work. Seaga wanted up-town guys who looked good, but he should have had people from the roots.” Elaborating further, he adds, “It was probably a big factor that the Byron Lee band didn’t smoke ganja like all the other musicians. . . . Lee’s band were just a calypso band really, playing dance music for people in the hotels, up on the north coast [of Jamaica].” Almost a decade later, though, with the release of Perry Henzell’s interpolation of the western genre in the form of The Harder They Come, featuring Cliff as the lead actor—and on the soundtrack along with Desmond Dekker, and Toots and the Maytals—the international profile of Jamaican music, which by this time had mutated into reggae, was raised substantially.66

The major focus of this heightened attention in the United States would prove to be Bob Marley and the Wailers. The Wailers’ ability to establish a certain profile in the American rock music market owed much to the promotional strategies devised by their label, Island Records—named after the 1957 Belafonte movie. The artwork for the group’s first U.S. release, Catch a Fire, involved an expensive sleeve that opened up like a lighter, reflecting both the project’s title and its connection to the emerging weed culture, the latter angle being one of the major selling points for the Wailers, reggae, and Rastafarianism among rock music audiences. Similarly, advertisements for the Wailers’ albums, certainly up until the late 1970s, by which point Peter Tosh and Bunny Wailer had left the group, were slanted toward

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