The Dawn Of Ska

Diving deep into a history of Jamaican music, John Jeremiah Sullivan attempts to pinpoint the emergence of ska:

When I … [was] doing my best to stake out some understanding of what was going on musically in Kingston in the late Fifties and early Sixties, I ran into the riddle that bedevils every person who gets lost in this particular cultural maze, namely, where did ska come from? That strange rhythm, that chop on the upbeat or offbeat, ump-ska, ump-ska, ump-ska, exemplified quintessentially in “Simmer Down” (or in parts of Bruno Mars’s “Locked Out of Heaven,” if there’s doubt of its relevance). Did someone think that up? Can it be traced to a particular song or band, or accident, or earlier Caribbean style (mento, calypso)? Maybe its evolution should be followed out of the island’s deeper past, from African and Afro-Caribbean sources, and Indian influences—both kinds of Indian, in Jamaica’s case. There were a disproportionate number of Chinese-Jamaicans helping to shape Kingston’s music scene—did that have any effect?

As with almost all cases of musicological origin-hunting, the answer is something tedious like, “Yes and no to all of the above.”

Multiple streams converged to prepare the ground for that rhythm, for it to become a rhythmic move that would make sense to the Jamaican ear (and body), or to the fingers of a Jamaican guitarist.

Nevertheless there are moments that can be pointed to, when you hear the insistent uptick venturing forth. Theophilus Beckford’s piano on the classic Fifties proto-ska “Easy Snappin’” is one. You hear it there in the way Beckford’s pounding the chord, hear the rhythm offering itself, If you felt like going all the way, we could play it like this. Count Ossie’s polyrhythmic Rasta drumming on the Folkes Brothers’ “Oh, Carolina” is another such moment. The horns on Cuban-Jamaican blues master Laurel Aitken’s “Boogie in My Bones.” (Or over in the States, electric-guitar pioneer Wild Jimmy Spruill’s string-scratching fingernail technique on Wilbert Harrison’s 1959 “Kansas City”—Spruill a sharecropper’s son from Fayetteville, North Carolina; Harrison a churchgoing city kid from Charlotte). Sit down with any ska freak, and they’ll give you many other moments.

(Video: “Simmer Down” by Bob Marley and the Wailers, 1964)