Contents - Beth Lesser

jah ThomaS
When Jah Life and Junjo first recorded the new songs with Barrington,
they included a deejay cut of most of the tracks. Jah Life’s business partner
Percy Chin recalls, “Junjo didn’t really know the business. He wanted to put
out 12 inches.” The original format of the songs were as “disco” 45s with Barrington’s
vocals and either a Jah Thomas rap or a dub following. So, when
Junjo was in England, he was originally looking for a deal for the 45s. In the
meantime, Jah Life and Percy released the material as the Bounty Hunter album
in New York. The Jah Thomas deejay tracks from the discos ended up on
a separate LP called Dance Pon the Corner * . The vocals where on one side and
the dubs on the other. Percy recalls, “We did not have enough songs from Jah
Thomas to make a full two sides.”
As a youth, Jah Thomas was working in a garage as a bodyman but seeking
a start in music. Growing up in Rosetown, where he moved at the age of eight,
Thomas would hang out in a small ghetto called Backto, at Three Mile. ** Each
day, he and his friend Guy Beckford would ride their bicycles after work down
into Backto to listen to music on the juke boxes in the little bars that lined the
streets. “It was a lively place with all these juke boxes. It’s a ghetto place and I
used to like [the] ghetto.”
After moving to Payneland, Thomas began following local sound Burning
Spear, selected by Stanley Braveman, with deejays Dillinger, Clint Eastwood
and Lee Van Cliff. “The owner was named Bones. He used to sell ganja, used
to smoke chalice, drink him Dragon Stout. A lot of deejays used to come, like
U Brown. But Clint Eastwood was my mentor there, cause he was the guy
who take up the needle off of the record and say [to me], ‘This is how you approach
a rhythm’, and from there I catch on.”
Thomas’s big break came with the hit ‘Midnight Rock’ in 1976 for Alvin
Ranglin’s GG label. Ironically, it was E.T. at Joe Gibbs studio who told the
youth that GG was holding an audition. Thomas recalled, “GG hear me tonight,
record me tomorrow, next week, the song is on the radio. He didn’t
hold back. It was an instant hit, eight weeks on the chart.” It was his first
recording, the first time he had ever been inside a studio. “I’ll never forget that
morning when Sly said, ‘Rolling’, and I started to do my song. It was Maxie,
the engineer. When I go in the studio to voice my first song, the mic was on
the mic stand, and when the music hit me, I tried to hold the mic, through I
used to be in the dance and hold the mic. [Maxie said], ‘This is a studio! You
can’t hold the mic. Step back and talk into the mic’. Then I come from top
again, ‘This one call the Midnight Rock, so Rock on! Yea!’”
* Not to be confused with Dance On the Corner which Jah Thomas released on his Midnight Rock
label in 1979
** Backto was another name for Majestic Gardens, an economically challenged area of St Andrew
near Three Mile
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