Prince Buster

To record the Folkes Brothers' "Oh Carolina," Buster drove into the Wareika Hills looking for a Rastafarian drum group — at a time when Rastafarians were, as Wikipedia's account of the song puts it, "marginalised in Jamaican society." He brought back Count Ossie's drummers, whose hand-drumming had never appeared on a commercial Jamaican record. The result is remembered as "a landmark single in the development of Jamaican modern music... for the incorporation of African-influenced Niyabinghi-style drumming." Buster, who would convert to Islam a few years later, kept using the idiom anyway, unbothered by who was or wasn't supposed to be welcome in a Kingston studio.

listen: upstream & heresource: Wikipedia — Oh Carolina (Count Ossie's drummers, landmark-single status) ↗share

1958

Oh CarolinaCount Ossie

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1964

One Step BeyondPrince Buster

listen for"Oh Carolina" opens on Count Ossie's hand drums alone — a rolling, processional pulse from Rastafarian worship, nothing like the R&B shuffles dominating Jamaican radio. That same marching, drum-forward pulse resurfaces underneath the horns on "One Step Beyond," Buster's 1964 instrumental: the drums stay out front, driving the track rather than just keeping time, the way Ossie's Wareika Hill players did on the session Buster brought them down the mountain for.

Before he cut a record of his own, Prince Buster was a regular outside the hardware store where sound-system operator Tom the Great Sebastian spun imported American rhythm and blues every Friday and Saturday night. Wikipedia's account of his teenage years credits that sound system with "his first introduction to the songs and artists that would later influence his own music" — Fats Domino's "Mardi Gras in New Orleans" chief among them, alongside the Clovers and Shirley & Lee. Domino's rolling, syncopated groove became raw material Buster would later take apart.

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1953

Mardi Gras in New OrleansFats Domino

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1961

Little HoneyPrince Buster

listen forDomino's "Mardi Gras in New Orleans" rides a shuffling, behind-the-beat piano triplet — the same swing scholars trace directly into ska's rhythmic DNA. On "Little Honey," the debut single Buster cut with drummer Drumbago and guitarist Jah Jerry in 1961, that shuffle gets turned inside out. "I put the march on the track," Buster said of the session, "and I asked him to put the accent on the one and the three and I had Jah Jerry come up with the strum of the guitar" — R&B's swing, flipped onto the upbeat.

Louis Jordan wasn't a name Buster singled out in interviews, but his jump blues was everywhere on the sound systems that shaped him. Wikipedia's history of ska groups Jordan with Fats Domino, Barbie Gaye, and Rosco Gordon as American R&B artists "whose early recordings all contain the seeds of the 'behind-the-beat' feel of ska and reggae." By the late 1950s, that supply of fresh American singles was drying up, and Jamaican producers — Buster among them — started cutting their own versions instead of just spinning imports.

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1949

Saturday Night Fish FryLouis Jordan

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1963

MadnessPrince Buster

listen forJordan's 1949 "Saturday Night Fish Fry" drives on a hand-clapped jump-blues shuffle, horns riding just behind the snare. Buster's 1963 "Madness" keeps that same uptempo, horn-led charge but relocates the accent: where Jordan's band leans into the downbeat, Buster's guitar and horns snap back on the offbeat — the same inversion Wikipedia's history of ska credits to Buster directly, who "essentially flipped the R&B shuffle beat, stressing the offbeats with the help of the guitar."