“After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.” ~ Aldous Huxley.

February, although the shortest month, carries the weight of history.  In the US it is the month assigned to commemorate ‘Black History’, a term (like the country) which unfortunately continues to judge people by the color of their skin.  February also celebrates Reggae music, that particularly Jamaican phenomenon which has transcended its island home.  So far this month I have been delighted to participate in a number of Jamaican music-based events.

Having grown up on the island of Jamaica from the early sixties to the seventies (I was amazed just now to realize it was actually just over a decade of my life that I lived there) I was privileged to be there for the significant evolutionary steps in the development of the genre, learning to dance the ska, then the rock steady, then the reggae.  But the roots of the music, the beats, were infused with the drums, the rhythms, of Mama Africa.

In the schoolyard of my primary (elementary) school, I learned some of the basic moves of the early music used by the enslaved Africans to blend their innate sense of rhythm and movement with the more socially acceptable (i.e. British) dance moves of waltzes and polkas.  Mento and quadrille were the names of the tunes and dances, carefully choreographed moves, partners exchanging partners and moving among each other as gracefully as you may have seen in any of the aristocratic parlors of the times.  The musical instruments were home-made, fashioned from simple wooden boxes with flexible metal strips that could provide basic melody when ‘twanged’, along with drums and flutes.  There is something irresistible about the sound that gets you moving, gets you bopping to the beat of songs like ‘Donkey want water, hold him Joe’.  In later years Harry Belafonte would immortalize some of these tunes ‘Day-oh’ on his album ‘Calypso’ which was the first LP to sell a million copies – in 1954! 

In the fifties and sixties, Jamaican indigenous music was influenced by music coming out of the US, carried from AM radio stations that could be picked up on the island, and later, records carried back from the US by Jamaican farmworkers.  Some songs (especially Country and Western) were covered by Jamaican artists and given an island flavor.  In other cases, the music was evolving much like in the Southern states, with an emphasis on the ‘back beat’.  The ska became wildly popular with average Jamaicans, a fast paced beat that had you dancing, swinging your arms and getting a good cardio workout!  At the time (and for a good while after), Jamaican music did not get any airplay on the radio, which resulted in the rise of the ‘sound system’ culture, music that was transported from dance to dance, and played on gigantic speakers.  In the UK, those dislocated Jamaicans who had been invited to the ‘motherland’ in droves, and been welcomed with bias, distrust, and outright discrimination, continued the sound system tradition, and created their own underground music industry.

I enjoyed revisiting this history lesson through an event sponsored by a local organization, in an open-air concert event last weekend.  Weaving a narrative of the history of the development of Jamaican music around live performances, the organizers did a great job of condensing a hundred years (or more) of history into a few hours.  A few days later I came across a documentary that expanded on one particular part of the story that had developed in the UK, a genre known as ‘Lover’s Rock’.

The energetic ‘Ska’ music had phased into a slower ‘Rock Steady’ beat in Jamaica, and this sound in England evolved on a slightly different path, one which dealt in love, and heart break, and was dominated by female singers.  Just as in Jamaica, these tunes were not given airtime.  The sound system culture was where these records and live performances flourished.  House parties, youth clubs, school halls were the venues for these dances, and the songs’ popularity was based on their reception by a hungry audience.  The documentary exposed the brutality of the experience for people of color, who may have been born in England, spoke with an accent identical to their white neighbors, but were subject to harassment and violence from racist police. One of the musicians being interviewed said (very matter-of-factly) that they couldn’t go to the pubs without facing racist taunts and bigotry, they couldn’t be seen on the streets after dark without the likelihood of being arrested and held ‘on suspicion’, and so they had to create their own safe spots, their own entertainment.  Some of the ladies of ‘Lover’s Rock’ had great careers in Japan and elsewhere, performing to massive crowds, but never had the success in their home country. 

Of course, I cannot write about the history of reggae music without speaking of Robert Nesta Marley, whose biopic was launched on Valentine’s Day to great fanfare.  The first concert I ever attended was in England, early in my nursing school experience, as I was trying to cope with the culture shock of moving from my tropical ‘no problem’ home to the more formal, grey and rainy Manchester.  Bob Marley and the Wailers was the concert, and having no concert experience I was a little shocked when, the moment Bob’s music started up, the people in front of me (a mostly white crowd, by the way), stood up, blocking my view of the stage.  But of course, once the music hit me, and I heard the familiar sounds that I thought I had left behind in Jamaica, I was up and dancing for the entire show.  And I haven’t stopped dancing since.

There is so much history that we need to teach ourselves and our children, and music is a great vector for the transmission of these messages.  Bob Marley took the speech of Haile Selassie, delivered to the United Nations, and crafted a message that resonates today: ‘Until the philosophy that holds one race superior and another inferior…’.  He took words from the great activist Marcus Garvey and sweetly admonished people to ‘emancipate yourself from mental slavery’.  His words were deemed so subversive and revolutionary that the Apartheid government in South Africa redacted them from liner notes, and scratched through tracks on albums to prevent Black South Africans from hearing them.  His band was invited to perform at the celebration of Zimbabwean independence (formerly known as Rhodesia – named after the colonial oppressor), after Bob memorialized the struggle of African nations to free themselves from colonial rule.

This Friday morning I can only skim the surface of this amazing legacy of music, of consciousness-raising lyrics, of dance inducing beats, and hope it inspires you to know your history, share the stories, and dance like no-one is watching you!

Have a wonderful weekend, Family!

One Love!

Namaste.