Contents - Beth Lesser

inSpeCTor willie
“Selecting a sound is not so easy. You don’t just play the tune. You have
to listen and follow up the deejay all the time. It take a lot of concentration,”
Willie explained in 1985. “You have to study the crowd. Cause, you see, I am
studying the crowd. Like, if I should play a tune and I hear them, like, ‘Farward!’
and make enough noise, well, I know instantly what type of tune they
like. I just keep on the same line.”
The selector was the glue that held the whole sound together. Without a
solid selector to maintain the pace, nothing else would function properly. “It’s
no use having a big sound and no selection of music or a selector [who knows]
when to fit in a tune,” U Roy recalls. “Because you have certain dance time
when a lot of people out on the street. If they are not hearing the type of tunes
for them to come in, they just not go to come in. Willie is good at that.”
Inspector Willie came from musical roots. His father was Count Lasher, a
well known old time calypsonian. Willie got his start selecting with the Stur-
Gav back when Ranking Joe was deejaying. But his first night proved to be
his last – at least, for a couple of years. That same night he played out, was the
night the sound got mashed up and closed down.
To his credit, Inspector Willie never ‘mixed’ on Stur-Gav. The current
trend, heavily used by Gemini and almost as much by Volcano, involved
dropping out the music for a beat and bring it back with a slam. Willie let
the music play as it was mixed by the engineer. Unlike other selectors, Willie
varied his selection greatly instead of sticking with the hits. He wasn’t afraid
to play artists who weren’t considered cool at the time, like Beres Hammond,
who, at the time, was dismissed as middle of the road, not roots enough for a
dance. Or he might throw in very un-dancehall styles of music, like festival
songs. He would play Tinga Stewart’s ‘Float a Come’ or even a deejay 45 like
Smiley and Michigan’s ‘One Love Jam Down’. He could pull out oldies like
The Eternal’s ‘Stars’ or The Mad Lad’s ‘Ten to One’, or more current but
less common selections like Hugh Griffith’s ‘Cool Operator’ or ‘I’m Coming
Home’, The Wailing Souls ‘Ishen Tree’ or the wicked Freddie McGregor
tune, ‘Roman Soldiers’ (produced by Niney the Observer). One of his favorite
pieces was the smooth and uplifting ‘Skin Up’ by Ernest Wilson. Another was
the Meditations’ ‘Turn Me Loose’. Willie liked to vary it up so that no two
nights were the same.
Stur-Gav could hold its ground in U Roy’s home turf. But when it first
came back on the road, I Roy started trying to muscle in with his Turbotronic
sound. “U Roy is more strict with his sound and wouldn’t, say, give you a
date unless you pay down some money,” Willie explained. “Well, after a time
now, is like the people couldn’t keep up to it, so I Roy come around and start
giving people date for no money. So, him start saying him control the area.
The people he was giving free dates say him sound was better than U Roy’s
sound. They was just, like, boosting him up. So they say, alright, since its bet-
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