walking upstream…
Toots and the Maytals
photo: celaur · cc by-sa 4.0 ↗Toots and the Maytals
sourcesJérémie Kroubo Dagnini — 2006 interview with Toots Hibbert (Ray Charles/Otis Redding naming) · Rolling Stone — Toots Hibbert obituary (Keith Richards on the Otis Redding resemblance) · Robert Christgau — Consumer Guide review of Funky Kingston (Otis Redding critical comparison) · NPR — Toots Hibbert obituary (bio, Toots in Memphis covers) · Wikipedia
Days before his death in 2020, Frederick 'Toots' Hibbert traced his voice back to church: 'I grow up in church with my parents and I start singing when I was a baby,' he told Hotpress. Born in 1942 in rural May Pen, Jamaica — the youngest of fourteen children, he said, though some accounts say seven — he lost both parents as a teenager and moved to Kingston, where a trio with Henry 'Raleigh' Gordon and Nathaniel 'Jerry' Matthias began cutting gospel-inflected ska for Coxsone Dodd. A marijuana arrest and eighteen months in jail gave him '54-46 (That's My Number)'; a session with Leslie Kong gave reggae its name, coined from local slang for something scruffy. Chris Blackwell renamed the group Toots and the Maytals and placed 'Pressure Drop' on The Harder They Come; by Funky Kingston (1973), the gospel shout he never dropped had become reggae's most soul-drenched voice.
the sound in question
1969
Pressure DropToots and the Maytals
walk the tributaries ↓
Ray Charles1950s–60s · Soul / R&B / Gospel
Asked point-blank, in a 2006 interview, what he'd listened to starting out, Hibbert didn't hedge: 'Ray Charles, James Brown, Otis Redding etc., very great people! But Ray Charles is one of the bests.' The debt runs deeper than fandom — Charles's founding move, singing church testimony over secular rhythm, is the same trick Hibbert pulled cutting gospel songs like 'Hallelujah' as uptempo ska at Coxsone Dodd's Studio One. 'The ska was in Jamaica,' he said, 'and I do a lot of gospel songs uptempo in ska music.'
listen: upstream & heresource: Hotpress — 'Never Grow Old ↗
1954
I Got a WomanRay Charles
2006
I Got a WomanToots and the Maytals
listen forPut Ray Charles's 1954 'I Got a Woman' against the Maytals' own reggae version of it and the lineage is a straight cover, not a borrowed feel. Charles rides an urgent piano vamp with call-and-response ad-libs straight out of the church; Hibbert keeps that same gospel shout and stacks it over a reggae skank, swapping the horn punches for guitar and organ chop without losing the testifying holler underneath.
Otis Redding1960s · Soul / R&B
In the same breath he named Ray Charles, Hibbert singled out Otis Redding too — and his own bandmate agreed. 'It come to me from Sly, of Sly & Robbie,' he told Hotpress. 'Sly say you can sing this song, man, you have a close voice to Otis... I also did quite a few others of Otis Redding, but I don't release them yet.' Critics had said it for over a decade already — Robert Christgau called him, in 1975, 'the nearest thing to Otis Redding left on the planet' — but it was Dunbar's nudge that sent Hibbert into the studio to cut Redding's own songs outright.
listen: upstream & heresource: Hotpress — 'Never Grow Old ↗
1968
(I've Got) Dreams to RememberOtis Redding
1988
I've Got Dreams to RememberToots and the Maytals
listen forRedding's original stakes everything on a slow-building horn crescendo and a pleading upper register that cracks on the title phrase. Cut two decades later in Memphis with Sly Dunbar and Robbie Shakespeare behind him, Hibbert's version keeps that structure nearly intact but roughens the vocal into more of a gospel shout than a plea — the same rasp that made bandmates and critics alike hear Redding in him, now aimed squarely at Redding's own song.