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“Christmas was BIG,” Stokey says (today he’s a host on Kingston station Kool-FM). Nicknamed “Beat Street”, Orange Street became the cradle of ska, rocksteady and reggae in the 60s and 70s, lined with record shops owned by now-legendary producers like Coxsone, Sonia Pottinger and Bunny Lee. He remembers growing up in Kingston in the 50s and 60s, on its’ famed Orange Street. To help paint a fuller picture of Jamaica at the time, we talked to a friend who was there: Stokey Love was the founder of Soul Ghetto, a sound system he started in 1968 and ran for two decades. When I was a yout’, the local department store would sponsor it, and Santa would journey down the road in a float that was all done up like a sleigh with reindeer… it was a street parade! And we would go up and greet Santa, and he would throw out gifts to the crowd.” And thus began a golden period for Jamaica’s unique homegrown Christmas catalog. Quite naturally, this would soon extend to holiday music, too. It was evident that this next generation of young, proud Jamaicans was eager to have a music to call their own–and Jamaica’s burgeoning record industry was only too happy to oblige. These were songs that featured not only elements of the island’s own musical forms (mento and its late 50s successor, ska), but also vocals sung in a native tongue about experiences familiar to Jamaicans. By the early 1960s, however, sound system operators like Coxsone Dodd (these were the men who owned the speakers, played the records and generally got paid according to how much beer was sold at the event) began to notice something: Increasingly, they were seeing a stronger reaction from the crowd to records that were more distinctly Jamaican-sounding. Likewise, the majority of songs being recorded by Jamaican artists during this period were simply attempts at mimicking those same American sounds. Throughout the 1950s, the island’s sound systems and dances were dominated by American records (mostly R&B, some jazz).
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This would, in turn, trigger a musical shift, too. The move toward Jamaican independence was already under way in the late 1950s and coincided with a growing sense of national pride across the country during this time. But that would soon change.ĭownload: Christmas Jambree :: A Vintage Jamaican Yuletide Mixtape (zipped folder)įor the songs collected here, we travel back to 1962, the year Jamaica gained its independence. As it happened, many of the Jamaican mento musicians became so frustrated with outsiders confusing the two styles that they eventually just gave in to being called “calypso” in order to sell records and please the tourists (as evidenced by the aforementioned Lord Lebby title). Why this matters is that, while mento is indigenous to Jamaica, calypso is not (it came from Trinidad). One known example is a frighteningly-rare mento 78 called “Jingle Bells Calypso” by the Jamaican artist Lord Lebby. There were many Christmas songs being recorded by calypsonians–and it’s entirely likely that these songs were enjoyed in Jamaica at the time–but scant details exist about any such Jamaican recordings.
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In the first half of the 20th century, calypso music ruled the islands. But several did–and they’re worth digging for. Back in the day, it was hardly a given that every Jamaican artist would record a Christmas song, unlike today. Traditional carols get a reggae underpinning while lyrics about snow and holly are usually substituted for sunshine and mango trees. But Christmas music in Jamaica is, well, uniquely Jamaican. There’s another seasonal harbinger, one that is more common around the world, and that’s the sound of Christmas songs on the radio. Yuletide sails into Jamaica each year on what the locals call the Christmas Breeze, a slightly crisper air that tends to waft through the island come December.