The Discography of Jamaican Music
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What About The Half That's Never Been Told?
Starting with the calypso craze of the 50s, Jamaican music is forever being discovered in countless articles, books, documentary & feature films. Much of this adopts a humorous tone, focusing on the more colorful artists, their colloquialisms and other "exotic" cultural context. Twenty years ago, when we began our research, we found scant information about the music itself, particularly lacking were details about Jamaica's homegrown music industry, its startling creativity and prodigious output. When Jamaican music was first created, it was island music, and it must have been inconceivable to its pioneers that it would one day gain worldwide recognition and be appreciated many generations later. Jamaican music has always been relentlessly current. It has always been about "hits". Records were made for the moment, recorded quickly, aimed & distributed to a local community & then "done". Nothing much was retained for posterity and thus many great recordings and even great artists were passed over. The only thing that remains is the music itself, mostly to be found on 7 inch 45 RPM records. In a way, to know the Jamaican 45 is to know the whole history of Jamaican music. It has been the goal of this project to record that history as accurately and completely as possible, tracking every detail down to the very last drop.
In the 1980s, while living in the Caribbean and then in the Hackney area of London, my casual interest in the music became a preoccupation. When I returned to the United States I began to write for The Beat Magazine, first a column about dancehall music, later, a column called Reggae Obsession where I wrote about little corners of Jamaican music history and interviewed some of my favorite artists like Vernon Buckley, Ken Parker and Winston Francis. At this time there was a lot the older music being reissued on the new CD format by Chris Wilson and Steve Barrow (at Heart Beat and Trojan Records respectively). But even so, as I dug deeper into the music, I found that a lot of the best stuff could only be gotten on old 45s, mostly available via mail-order catalogs. Since there were no discographies or reference books, I began to save and collate these catalogs in order to get some idea how much music was out there. At some point I began to talk with Bob Schoenfeld, who was doing something along the same line, and through our discussions we realized that together we would be able to build a definitive discography similar to those published about other genres like jazz and blues. It took several years but in 1999 we published Roots Knotty Roots, the first ever discography of Jamaican music, with over 29,000 listings.
I should say a few words about the late Bob Schoenfeld, who passed away several years ago. Unlike myself, Bob had a real career in music. He was cofounder and managing director of Nighthawk records which, in addition to its blues catalog, released a number of important albums by Jamaican artists like Justin Hinds, the Gladiators, and the Itals. Bob began collecting music in the early 70s, and much of our early research came from his huge collection - the bulk of which had been purchased from the owner of a Jamaican jukebox operation. (Bob said he had to rent a flatbed truck to haul it away.) Funnily enough Bob & I never met face to face. But we were in daily communication for over ten years, during which time I found Bob to be an unfailingly considerate and enthusiastic collaborator. I don't think we ever really seriously disagreed about RKR's content, although we differed in one important aspect: while I was quite happy to confine myself to researching the music, it was Bob who organized, financed and self-published all of the work that appeared under the RKR rubric - three book editions and then finally as a CD-ROM. During this time Bob struggled financially - I doubt that our project ever provided him a living wage. Bob died unexpectedly in 2006.
With his demise, the project lost its guiding force, along with all of RKR's computer files and subscription lists. I had neither the time nor the skills to publish a new book or CD-ROM, but I continued the research, and now, with the help of Benja Murphy it is now possible to make it available as a web-based document.
JA45 represents a big step in the evolution of this work. It has now grown to over 61,000 listings and, as you'll read below, details each record much more comprehensively than before. Not only is the discography much larger, it is also much more accurate. A large amount of time has been spent fact-checking and tracking down arcana. One criticism of our old name was that Roots Knotty Roots implied to some that Jamaican music was mainly rasta music - we know of course that Jamaican music is also ska, rocksteady, dancehall and mento, gospel, calypso, pop and soul and more. Our new name, JA45 is simpler and I think better suited to our goal of documenting every single produced not only in Jamaica but also in ex-patriot communities in the U.K. & North America. Obviously we're never going to reach such perfection but I would bet we're 85 to 90% there. So here it is, a very big document about a vast subject.
Michael Turner, April 2011