General Echo
Earl Robinson kept the volume down. Rehearsing behind his mother's house on Kingston's Maiden Lane in the mid-1970s, out of deference to the devout churchgoer who raised him alone, he practiced quietly on a little component set before he ever spoke behind a microphone at a dance. By 1978 that discretion was gone: as General Echo, he had turned his own sound system, Echo Tone, and then the bigger Stereophonic, into a springboard for 'slackness' — the explicit, comic toasting that made him dancehall's first true star of the form. His 1979 hit 'Arleen,' cut on the Stalag riddim for producer Winston Riley, sat at No. 1 for weeks. He was 24 when Kingston police killed him in a disputed 1980 shooting. Papa Michigan put it plainly: 'All a dem deejay who do slackness learn from Echo.'
In 1975 Echo was running his own small rig, Echo Tone, spinning soul records — until he caught Ranking Joe deejaying slack lyrics in the dance and switched from selector to talker himself. Three years later he worked directly under Joe on the Ray Symbolic sound before Stereophonic made him a star. Deejay Welton Irie, who watched both men work, drew the line plainly: 'Echo took it from him and took it to a slacker level.' Joe had only dabbled; Echo built an entire act, and eventually a genre, out of what his mentor treated as an occasional dare.
listen forNeither song borrows the other's words, but the delivery is the same trick worked two years apart: a deejay riding someone else's rhythm track — Joe over a 1977 Tony Robinson cut, Echo over the five-year-old Stalag beat — not by shouting over it but by half-singing through it, holding a melodic line the way a vocalist would instead of firing short, punchy interjections. It's the same rhythmic patience, one generation apart.
Echo never said so himself — no filmed interview survives him — but the scholar Beth Lesser, working from interviews with his own Stereophonic bandmates, places his delivery in a specific lineage: 'in the Big Youth tradition, Echo sang more than most other deejays at the time,' combining 'the skills of comic, impersonator and raconteur.' Big Youth had spent the mid-1970s turning toasting from a chant into something melodic enough to sing along to; by the time Echo picked up a microphone, that fuller, more theatrical delivery was simply how a deejay who wanted attention performed.
listen forBig Youth's 'Screaming Target' rides its rhythm in near-melody, dropping into different vocal characters mid-verse rather than holding one flat chant. Echo's 'Drunken Master' — his spoof of the 1978 Jackie Chan film — does the same trick with two voices traded line to line: a gruff, slurred drunk and his high-pitched, long-suffering wife. Neither man is shouting through the rhythm; both are performing a small radio play on top of it.