The Social and Aesthetic Roots and Identity of Ska

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The Social and Aesthetic Roots and Identity of Ska

University of the West Indies at Mona Lecturer, Clinton Hutton (C.H.). talks with Jamaican popular music historian-aesthete Garth White (G.W.) about the formative years of Jamaican popular music and the impact these had on him in shaping his own career path as a Jamaican popular music scholar.

C.H.: The Jamaican popular recording music culture has inspired and spawned a number of professions and interests, including your own. How has this inspired you and shaped your own agency to be?

G.W.: The reason for my interest was that, fortunately, I was born on the fringe of Trench Town, on a road named Greenwich Crescent, which leads us into West Road, the main road in Trench Town, which is now Amett Gardens. And so I was exposed from very early to many different types of music. In fact, I had a similar experience as some of the artists who would fashion this music I kind of grew up with it.

[I]n the park where [there] is now a round about, at the top of West Road in Trench Town - on a Sunday evening or sometimes during the week, you'd find Revival or Poko people holding their kind of session. There would be sound systems. Any number of them in Trench Town. And in fact, right opposite where I lived, there was a big famous, early dancehall named Live Wire Club.

Live Wire Club was the place where they had the famous, some said eleven, some said seventeen sounds, in one of the earliest clashes. But we didn't call it clash then. It was rivalry. But it didn't have the undertones of violence or bad feelings, you know. Seventeen sounds... in one dance.

[T]here would also be the occasional Kumina visits, in that same park. And in Trench Town, as most people know, you'd have had several Revival churches.

Now this is in addition to Rediffusion. Since many people really didn't have radios or turntables then, but depended on Rediffusion that is the arm...

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