Duke Reid
Arthur "Duke" Reid spent a decade as a Jamaican police officer before trading his badge for a mobile sound system in 1953, and by the end of that decade his Treasure Isle label — cut in a studio above his Bond Street liquor store — was producing some of ska and rocksteady's most lavishly arranged records, epitomizing, as one historian put it, "the absolute peak of the style." A perfectionist who layered strings and horns onto singles by The Paragons, Alton Ellis and Justin Hinds & the Dominoes, Reid had built his reputation on a sound system stocked with American jump blues and R&B, and that taste for showmanship outlived him: dub mixes of his old Treasure Isle rhythms, credited to his own name, were still being cut and released after his death in 1975.
Reid "particularly admired" Fats Domino, and that admiration is audible: the rolling New Orleans backbeat and warm, unhurried groove of Domino's earliest sides shaped the sound Reid chased in his own early productions before ska properly existed.
listen forDomino's 1949 debut "The Fat Man" rides a loping, piano-driven backbeat that Reid's Kingston session players absorbed wholesale — slow it down, swap the piano triplets for a guitar skank, and it's most of the way to rocksteady.
Reid ran his sound system on a diet of American jump blues and R&B 45s in the early 1950s — Louis Jordan foremost among them — and that jump-blues shuffle, carried to Jamaica on migrant workers' radios and record collections, is the direct rhythmic ancestor of the ska and rocksteady Reid went on to produce.
listen forThe strutting horn riffs and behind-the-beat swing of Jordan's "Caldonia" are the jump-blues "afterbeat" that Jamaican musicians exaggerated into the offbeat guitar chop of ska; the same horn-driven showmanship, just heavier and slower, turns up on Reid's own Treasure Isle dub sides.
Wynonie Harris's raucous jump-blues shouting was, like Domino's and Jordan's records, standard fare on the early-1950s Jamaican sound-system dances Reid ran before he ever produced a record — the same brash showmanship and hard backbeat runs straight through into the ska he'd help popularize.
listen forHarris's shouted, gospel-edged delivery on "Good Rockin' Tonight" is pure jump-blues bravado; Reid's Treasure Isle rocksteady sides keep that same declarative energy but trade Harris's honking sax for the liquid, syncopated bass that would come to define reggae.