As my favourite saying goes, be careful what you wish for as you might actually get it! For decades we’ve battled and argued for the popular music of Jamaica to be recognised as a classic art form. The problem now that arises is that it’s taken so long for that dream to become a reality that it feels like every other week we lose another pioneer. It is with that knowledge that we bid farewell to one of the most quiet spoken and least spoken about pioneers of Jamaican popular music, Mr Byron Lee who passed away on November 4th after losing his battle with cancer.
Some of the names who got a start performing with Mr Lee’s Dragonnaires band included Boris Gardiner, Bruce Ruffin, Count Prince Miller, Hopeton Lewis, Tinga Stewart and the very young Crown Prince of Reggae, Dennis Brown. For a better insight into his achievements, below is a an article that was published in the Weekly Journal in London from October 1993.
Weekly Journal OCTOBER 7, 1993
Treasures of the Islands
Kennedy Mensah charts the rich, 37 -year Caribbean history of Byron Lee & The
Dragonnaires
E
VERY summer, amidst the crowds, steel bands, sound systems and musi¬cal pot pourri that permeate the Notting Hill Carnival a new Soca/Calypso anthem emerges. 1993 was no exception, but this year's anthem is slightly different. It came not from the traditional island of Trinidad but from Jamaica. Byron Lee & The Dragonnaires featuring Admiral Bailey fused dance¬hall reggae with Soca and cre¬ated a new dance in the process. The dance is the Soca BogIe and the track, as you may have guessed, is Dancehall Soca.
The band responsible has been fronted by the enigmatic Byron Lee for some 37 years now, but began as a few guys celebrating their footballing success by singing.
"We won many cups and used to celebrate the victories in the dressing room playing calypsos, that's how the band started. The school was St George's and the mascot was a dragon so we became Byron Lee & The Dragonnaires ¬'aires' for music and 'dragon' for the school," says Lee, rem¬iniscing.
He goes on: "Our audience from the school grew up with us and wanted us to play at their weddings, graduation par-ties, birthnights etc. From this I would like to compare our¬selves to the Rolling Stones. Mick Jagger stayed popular because his audience grew up with him and their children followed; likewise us. In 1958 we started to play the music professionally, that is when we actually started to charge money.
"At the time there were a lot of bands playing the Mento in Jamaica. You ever hear of Lord Flee? Count Lasher? Sugar Belly? At the same time, Harry Belafonte was translat¬ing the Mento as Calypso in America with songs like Island h The Sun, Yellowbird, and Day O. You still hear those songs on the North Coast as a tourist in Jamaica today.
"We combined the folk music of Jamaica [Mento] with the Calypso from Trinidad and made what is now called Soca."
The band is 37 years and 54 albums down the line and has found a new audience. But where did all the music come from?
"We were influenced by a lot of artists from America. It was the time of that great musical explosion with Little Richard, Elvis Presley, Bill
Dogget and Chuck Berry. We started to jump up and dance on stage like Berry and wear pretty jackets. People had never seen this in Jamaica before; they used to laugh at us. They wouldn't use us for the big parties because they didn't know how people would respond.
"That's how the Jamaican music came too. They were lis¬tening to R&B from New Orleans, you know that ker¬chunk, ker-chunk from the backbeat that became Ska. Two to three years later the big bands died."
During this transitional peri¬od Jamaican music was search¬ing for an identity and all the artists tended to sound like their American heroes.
"Every one of those artists you hear of today, started off singing R&B. Bob Marley used to sing like Curtis Mayfield and The Impressions, Jimmy Cliff used to sing like Otis Redding doing Pain In My Heart lying on the ground, Desmond Dekker used to sing like the Coasters. They had to because there was no Jamaican music."
But when Jamaican music did find a direction there was no holding it back. Millie Small, Desmond Dekker and Jimmy Cliff with the help of Lee and others saw to that.
"We were instrumental in breaking the Jamaican sound, Ska. When it came out in 1963 it was us who took that music to the Jamaican people and up to New York to become what in England is now called dancehall or Ragga.
"Mr Seaga was the minister of culture. He said: 'Jamaica has now got independence [a year before] so we must stop copying other people's music.' He went into the poor areas and found people like our¬selves, Stranger Cole & Patsy, Jimmy Cliff, The Blues Busters, Prince Buster, Millie Small, Derrick Morgan, Bob & Marcia, eight of us. He sent us to represent Jamaica at the World's Fair in 1964 in New York. There was also a dance group with us
to do the Ska steps, that's where I met my wife Sheila."
In March of that year, Millie Small’s My Boy Lollipop reached number 2 in the British pop charts. In the ensu¬ing clamour, all the major companies wanted a slice of Island's good fortunes. The Dragonnaires, caught up in the
cheque book frenzy, signed to Atlantic. They were shipped to America for extensive promotional tours and forays into the studio.
The following year, Lee, the offspring of Chino-Jamaican parents, moved into the busi¬ness side of recording. A stu¬dio
was built and record shops were set up. His company
“People who have heard of us from before will think that we play old music.
That's not the case, the band may be old but the music is new. We have adapted to all music"
Dynamic Sounds is now arguably the most successful in Jamaica: employing some 150 people.
“As soon as we had enough money I invested in a studio. whenever there is something new on the market I buy it to update the studio”.
On the music front, by 1965 Lee's band had become the dance band. They would tour the world as the backing to almost every Jamaican star and became international stars in their own right. Desmond Dekker, Jimmy Cliff, Millie Small, and John Holt are artists who immediately come to mind. As well as home suc¬cess, reggae's international appeal drew established main¬stream artists to the Dynamic studio.
"Johnny Nash recorded there. Jimmy Cliff's The Harder They Come soundtrack was all recorded there. Paul Simon's Mother & Child Reunion, that number one tune, was recorded there. Eric Clapton came to record in our studios and met Bob Marley. He covered Marley's I Shot The Sheriff and it became an international hit. People wanted to find the writer of this._ wonderful song and it propelled Marley into international stardom," says Lee
"The Rolling Stones wanted to work with us, so we had to rebuild our studio to make it 24 tracks. Their attitude to work was very professional and we learned a lot from them. Before, we would just go to the studio and try a ting. Nobody would come prepared."
From small beginnings, Byron Lee's combo became a world leader. His business concerns have become a virtual empire. Four of his six children, (two boys, and four girls) are involved in the company. The two boys, one a salesman, the other an accountant, run the record company; the youngest girls run the record shops and one other daughter handles the publishing side of things, leaving Byron to his first love - playing in the band. Most men half as successful as Lee would retire, but not him. .
"Why do I still play? What would I do? I hate all those things. I don't like to sit in the record shop. I have an office don't even use, it's a store room now."
"I love it when he tours anyway," chirps in Mrs Lee, 'because that is the man I fell n love with."
"Anything to do with music has my ears," reaffirms Lee 'We represent a lot of music manufacturing companies in
Jamaica too; DD A, Clark, Techniques, JBL. Why don't we have say a soft drinks or beer company? Those things don't interest me, they are inanimate objects. Right now I'm trying to invest in telecommunications - a radio station and a television station. Wherever there is music you will have my ears."
All well and good but now in his fifties, does he not worry about the band's image?
"People who have heard of us from before will think that we play old music. That's not the case, the band may be old, but the music is new." Three of the band members have been with him for 25 years. The whole of the front line is aged under 29.
"Over the years we have adapted to all music. Being a dance band, we did not identify fully as a Ska, Rocksteady or a Calypso band. We played whatever was hitting, all the time we were still playing Soca."
Mr Vegas is havin’ a Jay Z moment and it’s official!!!!! In September of this year he announced his retirement from the dancehall. But it just so happens that he is now enjoying probably his best run of hits since his debut smash, ‘Heads High’. ‘Hot Wuk’, ‘Raging Bull’, ‘Tek Weh Yuhself’, and ‘Daggering’ have all ripped dancefloors to shreds in the past year or so. The current smash on the Reggae charts that features the unmistakeable voice of the dancehall star born Clifford Smith is ‘Mus Come A Road’ – The subject matter is not to my personal liking, but then who am I but a girls dem sugar? In a nutshell, Vegas is playing the part of an incarcerated drugs baron who is pledging revenge on his informants, when “him come a road”.
another unmistakeable classic dancehall voice, this time in the shape of the Reggae canary, Barrington Levy. The original track, ‘Prison Oval Rock’ released in 1982 vividly described an attempted prison break by inmates of the Spanish Town Prison who wanted to attend the dances that they could hear over the prison walls.
Barrington Levy’s former collaborator, Shyne.
He may be number 1 in Germany this week, but it’s nothing new for the dutty stinking one as at this time in 1990 – Shabba was in the middle of a 4 week run on top of the UK Reggae charts with ‘Caan Dunn’.
