Contents - Beth Lesser

to stay but she got pregnant with a second baby and ended up remaining for
the sake of the kids. Although she wanted badly to go back home, she knew
the kids would have a better, safer future abroad, so she stayed and eventfully
returned to recording. Now, with five children ranging in age from nine to
28, she has a new album, Bad Girl ina Dance and a single out with Teddy
Brown.
SeCond wave: junie rankS & The CounTeraCTion STyle
Firmly in the background for most of the early dancehall years, women
only began to make noticeable headway in 1987. This easing up began with a
trio of ladies who proved that women could record deejay hits, Lady Junie, Junie
Ranks and Sister Charmaine. With few role models to learn from, women
were pretty much on their own in the dancehall field. They remained loosely
connected to certain sound systems as performers, but were never the selector,
operator, or owner.
One of the ways female deejays increased their credibility was through
recording. Once they had a hit record, people were more accepting of them in
a dance. And 1987 brought a wave of female deejay releases in which women
took the opportunity to respond to the men, using the ‘counteraction’ format
in which they would take a popular song by a male deejay and answer it over
the same rhythm but from a female perspective. *
“That’s what really put [female deejays] out there right now. As soon as you
come with a song that somebody has done already, and you say, ‘NO’, it will
go out there,” Explained Junie Ranks. Like when Echo Minott did ‘What
the Hell the Police Can Do’ and Lady Junie come back with ‘Tell You What
Police Can Do’. When Admiral Bailey came up with ‘Gi’ Me Punany’, Junie
Ranks just replied, ‘Gimme the Buddy’ while Lady Junie challenged him with
‘Nah Get Punany’. Whatever the men said, in the late ‘80s, the women had a
response, and dance fans loved the action.
When Junie Evans was still a school girl of 14 or 15, she used to wait until
her mother was sleeping and then sneak out of the house and head for the
local community centre where they often held stage shows and sound system
dances.
“They might be having a concert at the community centre and they would
come and ask my mom, ‘Can Junie come, because we want her to perform,’
and stuff, and my mom would say, ‘No, she’s not a boy’. In those days, not a
lot of women [were] in the business like now. But, even though she told them
that I couldn’t go, before everybody go to bed, I would take my clothes and
put it outside on the line and as soon as everybody fall asleep. I would take my
own little time and open that back door, put on my clothes outside and run
away to the concert.”
* As the Soul Sisters (with Nora Dean) had answered Prince Buster’s Wreck a Pum Pum with Wreck
a Buddy in 1969, one of several examples of female artists talking back to the men
276 | RUB A DUB STYLE – The Roots of Modern Dancehall