Contents - Beth Lesser

to clash two or three times for the year. I would take my deejays and dubplates.
No discomix or 45. Strictly dubwise! If you play a 45, then you loose the clash.
Some really hard core music. In those days, it was really hard core dubplate.
For the whole night, dubplate. So much sound play 45 still because they don’t
have enough dubplate. We start play at eight o’clock. When [the other] sound
finish play, at twelve o’clock, we come on now and we draw the Burial * and the
crowd go wild. You have to draw the Burial to bury the sound!”
One of the most well known songs in reggae started life as a dubplate,
Burning Spear’s ‘Marcus Garvey’, produced by Jack Ruby, and played on his
Ocho Rios based sound system, Jack Ruby Hi-Power. ** Singer Winston Rodney
had been working with Coxsone Dodd and released two classic albums.
Then Jack Ruby found him and decided his rootsy vocal style was exactly the
sound people needed to hear. ‘Marcus Garvey’ was one of the hardest roots
tunes ever to come out of Jamaica. The crowds started coming and Jack Ruby
found himself owner of the most competitive set outside of Kingston. The
song broke both Spear and Ruby and created reggae history.
pre-releaSe
In the early days, before ‘version’ became the foundation of the dancehall
session, sounds competed for recordings of songs before they went into the
stores. Prince Jazzbo remembers his days with Killerwhip Sound in the ‘60s,
“In those days it was just pre-release songs. Nobody else got those songs. All
these brand new Alton Ellis, Heptones, all these great songs, we used to play
them before they released on the street because Coxsone [Dodd] used to come
to our dances and he always bring dubplates to give us to play.”
Producer and former Techniques member, Winston Riley remembers recording
for Duke Reid’s Treasure Isle studio and his music being used in
clashes, “There was a big competition, you know, between Duke Reid and
Coxsone. Anything we sing, he use it against Coxsone. He would play them
brand new. That is where we get the promotion from, all those dance songs.”
This test pressing served both the sound system and the producer. Playing
an exclusive recording both enhanced the sound’s reputation and was good
advance promotion for the record. Producers could try out new ideas and
new artists. A producer would give his neighborhood sounds a test pressing
and then hang around the dance to witness the crowd reaction. If he didn’t
hear his song, he would complain to the crew, “Bwoy, you nah play me tune,
Rasta. Two weeks and you nah play me tune…” *** Depending on the response
* Dubplate of the Peter Tosh song, Burial
** Jack Ruby also held jazz sessions every Sunday afternoon in his yard playing pure jazz as a means
of exposing the youth to different sounds, showing that the sound system could also be used as an
educational tool. It would have been interesting to see what else could have been done to reach
young people through this medium if any institution had been willing to experiment (author’s note).
*** According to Brigadier Jerry
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