U-Roy and the birth of the deejay
Somebody talking over a record was not a new idea. Doing it so well that the talking became the record was, and one man on King Tubby's sound worked out how.
U-Roy
Deejay
- Jones Town, Kingston, Jamaica
- 1960s to 2021
Ewart Beckford worked the microphone on King Tubby’s Home Town Hi-Fi, and what he did there changed what a record could be. Talking over a rhythm was not new in itself, but U-Roy did it with a musicality nobody had managed before: riding the beat, answering the singer, leaving space, coming back in.
In 1970 Duke Reid put him in a studio over old Treasure Isle rocksteady rhythms, and the results took over the Jamaican charts to an extent that sounds like exaggeration until you look it up. The deejay stopped being the man who kept the dance going between records and became the artist on the record.
Almost everything that followed, in Jamaica and a long way outside it, runs back through those sessions.
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