In late 1961, a young teenager called James Chambers turned up unannounced at Beverley’s restaurant and ice cream parlour on Orange Street in Kingston, Jamaica. In search of a sponsor, he told the owners, three Chinese-Jamaican brothers, that he had written a song for them. His audacity paid off and a few months later, Dearest Beverley was released as the B-side of a more topical and upbeat song called Hurricane Hattie, which became the first hit for the newly formed Beverley’s Records.
The single was produced by the label’s owner, Leslie Kong, one of the brothers for whom Chambers had auditioned. Kong would go on to produce a series of classic early reggae songs like 007 (Shanty Town) by Desmond Dekker and Monkey Man by the Maytals; by the time Dearest Beverley was released, James Chambers had turned 14 and was calling himself Jimmy Cliff, soon to be one of reggae’s biggest stars.
A plaintive ballad delivered over a rolling piano riff, Dearest Beverley is part of a Jamaican music scene taking its first steps towards global glory. This is the era immediately before the homegrown music of ska, rocksteady, reggae, dub and dancehall – a time when the American sound of doo-wop reigned.
The song is one of the highlights of If I Had a Pair of Wings, a compilation of Jamaican doo-wop songs from the 1950s and early 1960s, which was released last year on the archival label Death Is Not the End. The album includes similarly wistful offerings by the likes of Alton Ellis, Millie Small and Laurel Aitken, all of whom who would go on to become successful singers as post-independent Jamaican discovered its own distinctively offbeat rhythm in the early 1960s.
Now comes If I Had A Pair of Wings Volume 2, which has just been released in limited edition vinyl and cassette formats as well as a name-your-price digital download. It, too, is dotted with familiar names in their earliest guises. They include the inimitable Prince Buster, who fronts the Charmers in uncharacteristically restrained mood, and Derrick Harriott, lead singer of the Jiving Juniors – both singers would find fame in the mid-1960s rocksteady era. As before, nearly all the songs on the new compilation adhere strictly to the American doo-wop model – intricate vocal harmonies articulating lovelorn lyrics over often understated arrangements.
“A lot of what is now called Jamaican doo-wop is, in fact, a straight copy of the US style of vocal harmony singing, but that is not to say that the records don’t sound sweet and soulful,” elaborates Gladdy Wax, a reggae aficionado and broadcaster, who has been running his own British sound system for more than 40 years. “A great vocalist like Alton Ellis, say, who would later become known as the king of rocksteady, had a distinctive voice from the start, whatever style he was singing in. The same is true of a lot of Jamaican singers who started out in the 1950s – their voices shine from the start.”
The two most intriguing tracks on If I Had a Pair of Wings Vol 2 are Guilty Convict by Rupert “Rupie” Edwards and How Can I Be Sure by Higgs & Wilson. The former is a tougher-sounding, rhythm and blues influenced song that sounds like a precursor to the “rude boy” anthems that became so popular in the ska era, while the latter features a sinuous sax solo that prefigures the jazz-influenced style of the great Roland Alphonso of the Skatalites. It also features a young Joe Higgs, who went on to be a mentor for a generation of reggae singers, including the young Bob Marley.
Elsewhere, although there is nothing as mesmerising as US doo-wop classics like It’s Too Soon to Know by the Orioles or In the Still of the Night by the Five Satins, there are one of two songs that come close. A Thousand Teardrops by the Rhythm Aces & the Caribs features some wondrous harmony singing tied to a deftly understated backdrop created by the Caribs, an in-demand session group whose core members hailed from Australia and would later play a crucial role in shaping the imminent ska sound. The album’s most bittersweet moment belongs to Dobby Dobson, who passed away from Covid-19 in July, aged 78, and whose sweet-sounding voice can be heard on Chuck & Dobby’s I Love My Teacher, originally released in 1961 on the legendary Blue Beat label.
Luke Owen, who runs Death Is Not the End from his south London home, accurately describes Jamaican doo-wop as “a kind of prehistory” of Jamaican music. “Compared to the New Orleans’ rhythm and blues shuffle style that so influenced ska, doo-wop has been relatively under-appreciated as a stylistic influence on reggae,” he elaborates. “But you could argue that it influences both the vocal style of the rocksteady era and the three-part harmonies of classic reggae vocal groups like the Techniques and the Heptones.”
Doo-wop emerged out of the black ghettoes of urban American cities in the 1940s, its intricate vocal interplay becoming a touchstone for great 60s soul groups like the Impressions, who, in turn, influenced the singing style of the original Wailers and countless other Jamaican vocal harmony trios. (In 1965, The Wailers belatedly recorded their own homage to doo-wop with a jaunty reworking of Dion and the Belmonts’ classic of adolescent angst, A Teenager in Love.)
Like their American role models, many great Jamaican vocalists began by practising their harmonies on street corners, before graduating to the talent contest circuit that was the combative testing ground for raw talent in the era before the ascendancy of the early sound systems. Simultaneously, the 1950s produced a new breed of musical entrepreneurs, including pioneers like Duke Reid and Clement “Coxsone” Dodd, who would go on to run their own sound systems and recording studios, shaping the course of Jamaican music as much as the singers and musicians they produced.
Throughout all this, Jamaica’s proximity to America was a crucial factor. “All through the 1950s and early 1960s, Jamaicans were going back and forth between Kingston and New York,” says David Katz, author of Solid Foundation: An Oral History of Reggae. “They often returned home with suitcases full of the latest US singles. Classic doo-wop records would certainly have found their way on to local radio stations and early sound systems perhaps as a counterpoint to the more uptempo New Orleans rhythm and blues tunes that were much more popular in Jamaica.”
The songs collected on both volumes of If I Had Wings to Fly represent the first stirrings of a soulful vocal harmony tradition that began in the mid-to-late 1960s and continued into the 70s, when the influence of Rastafarianism produced the intensely devotional harmonies of the likes of the Abyssinians, Burning Spear, Culture and the Congos. Manna for music historians but surely enthralling to anyone, these songs are the starting point for Jamaica’s lineage of profoundly beautiful vocalists.
“For a small island, Jamaica has produced so many amazing singers,” says Gladdy Wax. “I think it is because, when they start out, they are often singing purely for themselves, for the pure enjoyment that comes from the act of expressing yourself in song, in beautiful harmonies and great vocals. That tradition runs deep.”
• Two volumes of If I Had a Pair of Wings are out now on Death Is Not the End.
