Before there was reggae music, there was rocksteady.
It was soul music that emanated from the roughest parts of Kingston, Jamaica, and featured sweet harmonies, a big thumping bass line and an impeccably mellow groove. Some say rocksteady emerged from a single hot summer in the middle of the 1960s when it was too steamy to dance to the faster beats of ska. Others trace it to a single studio, Treasure Island, or even a single song ‘ Alton Ellis’s Get Ready Rock Steady.

Rocksteady began for Tony Brevett one day in 1965 when he was singing at his house in Salt Lane ‘ maybe the toughest of the Kingston ghettos, where Brevett grown up as a rude boy street tough, running alongside his childhood friend Bob Marley and causing all kinds of mischief, musical and otherwise. Another young singer ‘ Trevor McNaughton, who sang bass ‘ heard Brevett singing one day and asked him to join a musical competition at a local theater. Shortly thereafter, the two musicians met another singer, tenor Brent Dowe.

When I met Brent we had a boxing match, Brevett recalled in an interview this week. And he was a bigger guy than me, so I said, ‘Wait a minute’ because there was a car coming down the street. So I said, ‘Okay, right now we are done with the boxing, because you are getting kind of mad.’ I was tall, you know, so I gave him a left jab, and he got kind of vexed. So I said cool it down.
A friend stepped in and pointed at Dowe. Tony, he can sing, you know, he said.
Well, let me hear him, Brevett said, suspiciously. Dowe obliged.

Once he started singing, I said, ‘I need him to be a tenor in my group,’ Brevett remembered.
And thus the Melodians were born. The band ‘ which plays Saint Rocke Friday night ‘ went on to become a big part of Jamaica’s rich musical history. The Melodians were in some sense the prototypical rocksteady group and scored several number-one hits on the island, including the way-ahead-of-its-time Everybody’s Bawlin’ (featuring pioneering DJ/rapper U-Roy) and the rocksteady classic Sweet Sensation. The group helped shape what would later become reggae music with one of the genre’s most enduringly beautiful songs, Rivers of Babylon, and from 1967 to 1973 produced a staggering amount of perfectly executed, uniquely Jamaican soul classics.
This was an incredibly prodigious musical period in Kingston. Music was literally in the air, as bass heavy sound systems filled the streets with battling melodies, and recording studios sprouted up all over the island, most headed by brilliant, scheming producers who ruled fiefdoms of aspiring musicians.

The Melodians recording career began when famed singer Ken Boothe heard them recording one day and invited them to Studio One, a recording studio and label presided over by a true Jamaican legend, Clement Coxone Dodd (the first producer to sign Marley to a contract; Marley also slept in a backroom at the studio for a time). Dodd soon brought the Melodians into his fold.

So we were going around to Studio One and I saw posters, like dance posters and I see, ‘Lay it on tonight!’ at this dance hall, Brevett said. So I said, ‘Whoa, that could be a song. Bob Marley and the Wailers had a song called ‘Put It On That was in ‘65, you know, so I started singing this song, ‘I’m going lay it downbecause I want it to feel alright.’ And by the time we reached that studio we were singing that song. So we recorded it for Studio One.

The song shot immediately to #1, and several more followed. Dodd and the Melodians’ relationship was brief but fruitful.
He was a good guy, Brevett said. A lot of guys kind of feared him, you know, because he used to beat up a lot of his artists He kind of punched them because they wanted more money. But he gave us 20 pounds for the first two songs.

The band ended up recording for an assortment of some the island’s most storied labels and producers ‘ including a string of hits on Duke Reid’s Treasure Island label ‘ but probably made their biggest mark on Leslie Kong’s Beverly label. Kong was a Chinese-Jamaican businessman who built a recording studio above his ice cream parlor and became one of the most influential producers of the era, producing Jimmy Cliff, Desmond Dekker, and Toots & the Maytals.

Brevett said that Kong paid every member of the group 20 pounds a week, whether they recorded or not ‘ a rich deal by the standards of the Jamaican recording industry at the time.
Those were good times, and those times we were making good music, also, Brevett said. When reggae came in in the late ’60s, that’s the time the beat started to change.

The Melodians had a song, Rivers of Babylon, on the soundtrack for The Harder They Come, the low-budget Jimmy Cliff movie that helped make reggae an international phenomenon in 1972. The record made them international stars, but by 1973, the group had parted ways. They occasionally reunited over the next two decades until finally and permanently rejoining when roots reggae became popular in the 1990s. They finally went back into the recording studio a few years ago, but tragically Dowe passed away before the project was completed.

But as it has for nearly five decades, the music must go on, rock steady. The Melodians continue to tour and their new album is expected to be released soon. As McNaughton told the Jamaica Gleaner newspaper shortly after his band mate’s passing, We not going to stop. Brent Dowe would not want us to stop.
The Melodians are at Saint Rocke Nov. 7. See www.SaintRocke.com for more info. ER

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