Studio One Reggae
The pick of Jamaica’s foundational label.
By Simon McEwen.
Mixing things up: Studio One’s visionary owner/producer Clement ‘Coxsone’ Dodd left behind the finest catalogue of reggae music ever recorded.
Brian Jahn/
urbanimage.tv, Alamy
REGGAE’S MOST important record label Studio One began life 70 years ago as a soundsystem in Kingston, Jamaica. Its then 22-year-old owner Clement ‘Coxsone’ Dodd (he was a good cricketer at school and was nicknamed after short-tempered Yorkshire bowler Alec Coxon) was an avid jazz fan who during a 1954 trip to Harlem in New York had picked up a batch of boogie woogie, R&B, merengue and jazz records to play out on his Sir Coxsone’s Downbeat soundsystem. With deejay pioneer Count Machuki on mike duties, Coxsone’s sound was an immediate sensation, rivalling the more established Duke Reid’s Sound System and Prince Buster’s Voice Of The People. But as the American R&B craze fizzled out towards the end of the 1950s, Dodd and his competitors were forced to record their own homegrown Jamaican music to meet demand.