Contents - Beth Lesser

Ranger. I hear about what you did the other night with my sound system, and
I would like you to work for me. I told him I couldn’t cause I was working
with a sound called Soul Express. He said, ‘No you are not. You are gonna
work for me. I’ll pay you double. Whatever it is, I’ll pay you’. So I said OK.
I’d be more facing the uptown crowd now.”
The ‘uptown crowd’ included a lot of police officers and their girlfriends.
Soul to Soul was playing to the comfortable, well- heeled crowd at the time,
but once Ranger came with this rub-a-dub grove and his slackness, the sound
took a turn and began to build up a roots following, “It was doing good,”
Chester explains. “It was the strongest sound in Montego Bay but it didn’t
have nothing great ina Kingston – until Ranger take it up. Kingston and Mobay
– him have the date them book. I think only pon Monday them no play.
But them play every other night.”
Soul to Soul * was started by Tony Green, aka Rosa, and three friends in
Montego Bay. Rosa explains, “I used to have a sound before called Supertone
and it was three of us that owned that sound. One of the guys went away to
Bermuda. And then after that, a couple of the guys on the set get together and
ask me if I want to set up a thing. We had a meeting and we decided to start
the sound and I gave it the name Soul to Soul. One of the owners was Oliver
Grandison, just a sergeant at the time. We specialized in a lot of soul music
in the beginning.”
Soul to Soul had a peaceful start in Montego Bay. “In those days it was
different,” Rosa comments. “There wasn’t that much violence in the dances
because of the police presence that we had. A lot of people came out to dances
because they feel secure and safe. We catered for a more peaceful crowd. You
know, you come to the dance and you see a lot of soldiers and police, you find
that a lot of bank clerks follow the sound, nurses and doctors, everybody on
that upscale fraternity used to follow the sound because they used to feel so
safe and secure. We used to play like an hour of reggae music, half an hour
of soul, another 15 minutes of calypso. We were playing reggae, calypso, rock
and roll, everything—everybody was being entertained.” There was no need
to have a deejay, at least in the beginning.
But times where changing. Soul and funk sets in the city were playing
more reggae and starting to feature a live deejay for the reggae segments. In
1978, Soul to Soul started using deejays. At first, Rosa explains, not everyone
appreciated the change. “It wasn’t everybody who liked the deejays. So, we
didn’t make the deejays be too monotonous [i.e. by performing all the time].
We did it in different segments. Like in one part of the reggae we used to play
singing songs and then in the other part we used to play singing songs for
about a minute then we would turn over the record – the version is on the
* The name comes from Soul to Soul, the 1971 documentary film of a concert in Ghana that featured
artists like Tina Turner, Wilson Pickett, Santana and the Staple Singers
110 | RUB A DUB STYLE – The Roots of Modern Dancehall