2020 In Memorium - #4: Millie Small (Born 1947)

Millie Small (1947 - 2020)

One of twelve children born to a sugar plantation overseer in Clarendon, Jamaica, Millicent Dolly May ("Millie") Small's rise to fame began in 1960 when she was twelve years old, with her participation and subsequent victory in the popular and influential Vere Johns Opportunity Knocks Hour talent contest on RJR radio, broadcast nationwide in Jamaica (a show that also launched the careers of Alton Ellis, Desmond Dekker, Laurel Aitken and The Wailers, among many, many other music giants). After her victory, she began working with acclaimed producer Coxsone Dodd, who paired her first with Owen Gray, then with Roy Panton, for a series of well-received Jamaican R&B/"bluebeat" singles. Producer Chris Blackwell, seeing her local success, began envisioning bringing Millie's music to a wider audience, and after stepping in to become her manager and legal guardian, brought her to London in late 1963 for further training in speech and dance in anticipation of an international launch.

Millie's initial recording for Blackwell in England, "Don't You Know", did nothing over there. Searching for a potential hit, Blackwell recalled a record he purchased in the States in 1959, a minor hit in 1956 for an obscure singer, Barbie Gaye, called "My Boy Lollypop".  He changed both the spelling (from "Lollypop" to "Lollipop") and arrangement (from an R&B "shuffle" style to a similar shuffling but modified bluebeat variation called "ska"), and had Millie's version  released in England by March 1964 (not on Island Records, but on Fontana, due to the strain the record would have put on the former record company's resources).  The song was a smash hit, reaching #2 in the UK, US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, topping the charts in Ireland and selling over six million copies worldwide.  Cconsidered the first commercially successful international ska song, Small's version of "My Boy Lollipop" helped to launch Island Records into mainstream popular music. To this day, it remains one of the best-selling reggae/ska hits of all time.

For a brief moment in time, Millie was the toast of the music world. achieving international fame at the tender age of sixteen.  She appeared frequently on British television during that time, both in musical performances (she was a guest performer on the May 1964 TV special Around The Beatles, and had her own Ready! Steady! Go! special, "Millie In Jamaica" in early 1965) and dramatic performances (she was featured in ITV's Play Of The Week "The Rise and Fall of Nellie Brown", airing during the 1964 holiday season).

In the immediate wake of "My Boy Lollipop", Millie Small followed up with a couple of smaller hits (her next release, "Sweet William", made the UK Top 30 and US Top 40). But her chart presence and attendant fame dwindled very quickly, with her last appearance in the British Top 50 occurring in late 1965, when her song "Bloodshot Eyes" reached #48. Her recording contracts with Island and Fontana ended in 1968. After a brief surge in her exposure in the late Sixties, coinciding with the emergence of reggae music, Small ended her recording career in 1971 and moved to Singapore for a couple of years. She returned to England in 1973, the same time a major compilation of her work was released, then all but fell off the map for several years.

In 1987, a British news service searching for her whereabouts for the past fifteen years discovered that Millie Small was destitute, living in a filthy hostel in London with her toddler daughter. A fund was established for her livelihood, and in that same year came the first of several awards and special recognition to her from the Jamaican government for her pioneering and groundbreaking music career. Millie continued to live in London until this past year, when she died of a stroke there on May 5th at the age of seventy-two.

"My Boy Lollipop" is a great song, a true classic. But to be frank, I seriously doubt that she could have sustained a long-term career... probably because a little bit of Millie Small goes a long way; her high-pitched vocals - described as sounding like "a dentist's drill" or "a chipmunk on helium" - were acceptable enough in small doses, but wearing on listeners over a full album.

But I'll let you determine that for yourself. In commemoration of her life, here's a definitive compilation of all of Millie Small's solo hits, My Boy Lollipop Plus 31 Others, released by Comb A Rama on October 20th, 2011. Have a listen and let me know your thoughts.

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2020 In Memorium - #3: Toots Hibbert (Born 1942)

Frederick "Toots" Hibbert (1942 - 2020)

Back when I was working in the Washington, DC area in the mid/late 2000s, I used to spend a lot of time after work at a bar/coffeehouse called Tryst, in that city's Adams-Morgan neighborhood.  The big, comfortable, rustic old space it occupied was furnished with huge old mismatched tables, sofas and lounges all seemingly scrounged from a garage sale, and local art covered the unevenly painted walls.  Yeah, it was (ant still is) sort of a local

hipster's hangout, a place for people who thought they were cool/bohemian/arty to see and be seen in.  But it has a nice ambience, the staff was great, most of the customers were easy-going, and there was nice coffee and a decent bar/food menu available (one of my favorite drinks there was what they called a Dufrene, which was a pint of Guinness with a shot of espresso poured into it).  Plus, they had free wifi, so if you could find a seat at a table, you could basically sit there all evening, eating, drinking and browsing the Web.

Tryst would host various cultural events from time to time, including art openings, left-leaning political get-togethers and DJ nights - events that I usually tried to avoid, not that I was "anti-" any of that, but since the space required to set up these events would mean less available seating for potential customers, and I generally got there later than most. I hated having to stand around by the wall, strategically positioning myself to commandeer a seating as soon as a current occupant made the slightest indication that he or she was about to vacate.

Anyway, one night in the spring of 2006, they were having another DJ night at Tryst, but this time I had arrived there early enough to place myself at one of the coveted seats/tables. I was sitting there chilling out, with a Greek salad and a Dufrene in front of me, watching Fritz Lang's classic thriller M on my laptop and not really paying much attention to the record spinner, who seemed to be playing a lot of deep house and dub sides... when all of a sudden, one of the cuts he put on caught my attention - THIS one:

Although by that point in life, I was a pretty big ska and reggae fan, somehow I had no awareness of this tune the DJ played that night. I might have heard it before and it hadn't connected, perhaps... but no matter - it DEFINITELY connected that night. Before the song was half over, I rushed to the area in Tryst when the turntables were set up to learn the name of this great song and band.  It was "Funky Kingston", off of the album by the same name, by Toots & The Maytals.

Frederick Hibbert was born in 1942 in Jamaica, the youngest of seven children. His parents were both fundamentalist Seventh Day Adventists preachers, so Hibbert's earliest singing experiences were with church gospel choirs. However, before he turned twelve, both of his parents had died, leaving him an orphan raised by his older brother John, who lived in Kingston in the soon-to-be-famous Trenchtown neighborhood, birthplace and crucible of modern Jamaican music.

There in Trenchtown, with his childhood friends Raleigh Gordon and Jerry Matthias, Toots formed the first version of the Toots & The Maytals trio in 1961, when he was nineteen. The band's early ska/rocksteady songs, such as "Six And Seven Books Of Moses" and "Hallelujah", were rooted in Hibbert's religious upbringing. But the band quickly moved on from those themes and expanded their repertoire. By the mid-60s, Toots & The Maytals were one of the biggest bands in Jamaica, with producers clamoring to work with them and the group producing hit after hit, including "Bam Bam", "54-46 That's My Number" (inspired by Hibbert's 18-month stretch in prison for marijuana possession) and "Do The Reggay", the first song to refer to (and subsequently coin the term) "reggae", the then-new music genre that continues to this day.

 

Toots & The Maytals had released several albums in Jamaica during the 1960s, but by the early '70s they - and reggae music in general - were still relatively unknown in the rest of the world. That international perception began to change in 1972 with the release of the film The Harder They Come, an underground hit in the UK which featured two Maytals songs in the soundtrack. Attempting to strike while the iron was still hot, producer Chris Blackwell hustled the band into Dynamic Sounds Studio in Jamaica, and by the early spring of 1972 had released Funky Kingston, the group's first international album, in Britain and other Commonwealth countries. In 1975, a revised version of Funky Kingston was released in the States, retaining only three songs from the 1972 release and adding six from the Maytals' immediate follow-up album In The Dark, along with the single version of "Pressure Drop" from The Harder They Come soundtrack.

Here's the lineup on the original release:

1. "Sit Right Down" — 4:44
2. "Pomps And Pride" — 4:30
3. "Louie Louie" — 5:46
4. "I Can't Believe"
   
5. "Redemption Song" — 3:26
6. "Daddy's Home" — 5:05
7. "Funky Kingston" — 4:54
8. "It Was Written Down" — 3:04

And here is the track listing on the U.S. release:

1. "Time Tough" — 4:23
2. "In the Dark" — 2:48
3. "Funky Kingston" — 4:54
4. "Love is Gonna Let Me Down" — 3:15
5. "Louie Louie"
6. "Pomps and Pride" — 4:30
7. "Got to Be There" — 3:06
8. "Country Road" — 3:23
9. "Pressure Drop" — 3:46
10. "Sailin' On" — 3:35

Both versions were celebrated, and the album is credited with breaking reggae internationally. The US version is ranked at #380 in Rolling Stone's 2012 list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, and rightfully so.

The original Toots & The Maytals continued on as a unit until the early 1980s before breaking up, with Hibbert having a long subsequent career as a solo artist, collaborator with the likes of Willie Nelson, Gov't Mule, The Red Hot Chili Peppers (among many others), and reviving the Maytals from time to time with new members.  Toots performed right up to the end, with his final appearances in the spring and summer of 2020, just before he took ill.

 

Frederick "Toots" Hibbert died of complications from contracting the COVID-19 virus in a hospital in Mona, Jamaica on September 11th, at the age of seventy-seven.

 

In honor of his life, I present to you both versions of the seminal album Funky Kingston:

• The original version, released on Dragon Records (a subsidiary of Chris Blackwell's Island Records) in April 1972; and
• The U.S. version, released on Mango Records in mid-1975

Enjoy and pay tribute to one of the founding fathers of reggae! And as always, let me know what you think.

Please use the email link below to contact me, and I will reply with the download link(s) ASAP:

• Funky Kingston (Original 1972 Jamaica/UK Release): Send Email  

• Funky Kingston (Revised 1975 US Release): Send Email

Various Artists - Club Ska '67

OK, OK . . . the people have spoken, and I have heard.

Along with the huge demand for my last post, More Intensified! Volume 2 - Original Ska 1963-67, for the past two days requesters have been clamoring for the other disc I mentioned in that writeup, Club Ska '67. This is one of the original ska compilations, and is even harder to find than More Intensified!; like its brother, it too has been out of print for eons. I recently noticed a CD copy of this one for sale on Amazon . . . for $150. Glad I bought mine when I did!

Club Ska '67 differs somewhat from my previous posting in that it mostly eschews rarities and instead focuses on the classic recordings from that period. And what classics they are - some of the all-time great Jamaican hits are here.  Here's the lineup:

1. Guns Of Navarone - The Skatalites
2. Phoenix City - Roland Al And The Soul Brothers
3. 007 (Shanty Town) - Desmond Dekker
4. Broadway Jungle - The Maytals as The Flames
5. Contact - Roy Richards With Baba Brooks
6. Guns Fever - Baba Brooks
7. Rub Up Push Up - Justin Hines & The Dominoes
8. Dancing Mood - Delroy Wilson
9. Stop Making Love - Gaylads
10. Pied Piper - Rita Marley
11. Lawless Street - The Soul Brothers
12. Skaing West - Sir Lord Comic & His Cowboys
13. Copasetic - The Rulers

It's hard to choose favorites off of this one - EVERY song is outstanding!

Enough of my yip-yap - I heed the call of the masses, and acquiesce. Here, for your listening pleasure, is Club Ska '67, originally released on vinyl in Jamaica by West Indies Records Ltd. in 1967, in Britain on Trojan Records in 1970, and finally re-released on Mango Records (a subsidiary of Island Records) in 1980. Skank on, my brothers, and as always, let me know what you think.

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