Contents - Beth Lesser

incarcerated at that time” *
CarlTon livinGSTon
“Basically we all came to the states around ’82”, Carlton recalls. “Me,
Ranger, Sammy Dread, Lui Lepke. They came before me. With me it was
totally different. I just came to work with Sam [Selkeridge, his manager].”
Sam was taking Carlton, Ranger and Tristan on a tour around the U.S. and
Canada. But in the end, Carlton stayed just like the others and began to find
a place in the burgeoning New York scene. That’s where he met Jah Life and
recorded his classic 45, ‘One Hundred Weight of Collie Weed’.
Carlton first came to the attention of dancehall fans while still in Jamaica
with ‘Trodding Through the Jungle’. The original version of ‘Trodding’ came
out as a 45 in 1977. Carlton used to sing the lyrics at dances, which is where
Flabba Holt heard the song and suggested he record it for GG’s, for whom
Flabba was working at the time. “So, I end up doing about four songs for GG,
[one of] which was ‘Trodding’. But it was a little bit slow because in those
time, most of the tracks were slow.”
This original version didn’t go very far due to the lack of energy in the
backing track. “After that I was in the studio with Robbie [Shakespeare, for
his Taxi label] putting down some tracks – just some overdub vocals – and
[engineer] Soljie came and said, ‘Why don’t you do this song over for Taxi, a
little bit faster?’ and I was like, ‘I did it already’. And he was like, ‘Come on’.
So we end up doing it for Taxi.” The faster pace gave it the lift it needed, and
the second version took off, but as a dubplate before the official release.
“I remember, when I left Jamaica, they had just released ‘Trodding
Through the Jungle’. When that song came out – the reaction of the people!
Cause it started to creep up on sound systems. I remember that one of the first
sound that play that song was Socialist Roots. The next day somebody came
to me and said they heard that song playing over in Jungle by the water tank,
and they had to play that about three or four times! Then other sounds start
to play it and so after a while it start to get real popular so it was quite a while
after that Robbie decided to release it [as a 45 to the public].”
As one of the sizable group of Jamaican artists who settled in Brooklyn,
New York, in the early ‘80s, Carlton soon gravitated to fellow ex-patriot Jah
Life’s house where all the recently re-located entertainers gathered. Soon, Jah
Life was carrying Carlton along with the rest of the crew to Phillip Smart’s
HCF studio on Long Island where he recorded, among many songs, ‘One
Hundred Weight of Collie Weed’ which proved to be his most popular and a
much sampled and imitated dancehall classic.
“That song just came, cause I knew some guys who were doing some ‘stuff’
and I end up at their house one night and I went to the basement and I saw
all that stuff inside there and then when I went back, and Jah Life was [in the
* http://home0.casteksystems.com/HCF/test.html
154 | RUB A DUB STYLE – The Roots of Modern Dancehall