Contents - Beth Lesser

of the dancehall scene. But that didn’t mean they weren’t trying to break in.
One of the welcome changes in dancehall in the ‘80s was the gradual appearance
of more women at the microphone. Formerly, women hadn’t received
much respect in the dancehall world. This unwritten prohibition began
to loosen significantly around the mid ‘80s when a handful of sounds started
to carry female deejays. Black Scorpio had Shelly Thunder first, and then Lady
G who, although never appearing with the same frequency as General Trees,
was present for big clashes and often traveled with the sound. Sister Maureen
sometimes appeared with Jammy’s in 1986 and ‘87, and she managed to cut a
few good tunes motivated by her outrage at the way women were represented
in the dancehall. Sister Carol, in New York, appeared with Jah Life’s Hifi, and
was making major inroads with her records as the solitary roots deejay among
the women. But the numbers were small and scattered throughout the decade.
The process of integrating females into dancehall was lagging way behind
other changes in the music.
firST wave: The pioneer, lady anne
Like Sister Nancy, Lady Ann started hanging around the dancehall in the
‘70s. She didn’t set out to be a trailblazer. She was just doing what came naturally,
growing up in Kingston 13 where it seemed like every other person was
in the music business.
A dedicated tom-boy, Ann would sneak out of her house to see VJ the
Dubmaster and Papa Roots with her pal, future deejay Clint Eastwood. Later,
she would do the circuit with her best friends Toyan and Little John, going to
sounds like King Pruff (which was renamed Ribbit after the popular dancehall
vocalization) and Romantic. By the time she was 16, she was performing
occasionally on sounds like Roots Unlimited with Josie Wales and Stereophonic
with General Echo.
“When I start, to be honest, they didn’t really have no woman deejay then.
Further on then I start to hear Kojak and Liza, Althea and Dona. There wasn’t
no other females when I started.” Althea and Dona had a huge hit, ‘Uptown
Top Ranking’ (Joe Gibbs 1978), which rose to number four on the UK Singles
Chart. But Althea and Dona were not dancehall deejays. Only Liza was on
the scene at sessions occasionally, along with her male recording partner, Kojak.
There was another woman named Sister Charm who kept to the Waltham
Park area, but no strong role models for Ann to follow.
Lady Anne’s problems started when she began recording. ‘Shine Eye Boy’
(Roots Tradition, 1980), a response to Barrington Levy’s hit for Junjo and Jah
Life, ‘Shine Eye Girl’, landed her in trouble with Junjo. “The song was getting
a lot of attention, a lot of airplay. It was really doing good in England. Junjo
was in England with Barrington and heard the song playing and was upset,
so he wanted to hurt me. At the time ‘Shine Eye Girl’ did release and him
never really want nothing to take away the attention from his artist. He was
mad! He buy a cow foot and say he was going to lick out all my teeth. So, I
274 | RUB A DUB STYLE – The Roots of Modern Dancehall