KING ALPHA's SONG in a STRANGE LAND: Jamaican
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King Alpha’s Song in a Strange Land: Jamaican Migrant and Canadian Host in Toronto’s Transnational Reggae Music Scene, 1973-1990 by John Jason Collins Wilson A dissertation Presented to The University of Guelph In partial fulfilment of requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History Guelph, Ontario, Canada © John Jason Collins Wilson, May 2013 ABSTRACT King Alpha’s Song in a Strange Land: Jamaican Migrant and Canadian Host in Toronto’s Transnational Reggae Music Scene, 1973-1990 John Jason Collins Wilson Advisor: University of Guelph, 2013 Doctor Catharine Wilson Reggae music facilitated a cultural dialogue between Jamaican migrant and Canadian host in Toronto during the 1970s and 1980s. Exchanges flowed across the city’s ethnic frontier, bridging black and white youth together in an ‘oppositional’ and musical movement. While migrants enacted their Jamaican ethnicity in places where reggae was played, many non-Jamaicans satisfied a curiosity in the music of their migrant friends. This study examines the process of migration of people and music as seen from both the migrant and the host’s perspective. It is as much about black Jamaicans as it is about white Torontonians. Twenty Jamaicans and twenty non-Jamaicans were interviewed for this project. Though reggae became an expected part of Toronto’s musical vernacular, the Canadian version meant different things to different people. Indeed, sometimes the only thread that tied the varied experiences together was that Toronto was the place where reggae happened. Still, as a hybrid, reggae had rather evolved outside of place. It was a transnational musical form, constantly updated by influences traversing the ‘Black Atlantic’ in an on-going and triangular musical conversation. While Jamaican migrants carried their music with them wherever they went, radio and sound systems broadcast British and North American musics back to Jamaica, informing new musics being created there. Simultaneously, Jamaican music was reimagined by West Indian immigrants, their children and even non-Jamaicans living in Britain’s urban centres and, later on, in Toronto. Yet, as popular as it may have been, Reggae Canadiana never reached the heights it might have and was not nearly as successful as its British counterpart. Nevertheless, the majority of migrants in this study believe that an association with reggae music gave them a psychological advantage in their own acculturation process. Reggae music also served as a bridge between migrant and host, without which, many non-Jamaicans believe that they would have had little or no contact with the Jamaican-Canadian community in Toronto. The impact of this contact transcended a shared affection for music and engendered a vital multicultural dialogue that is somewhat removed from Canada’s official governmental version of multiculturalism. Talking about music is like dancing about architecture. ~ Thelonious Monk Anyone can cook. ~ Chef Gusteau iv TABLE OF CONTENTS – ACKNOWLEDGMENTS vi I WHEN WE REMEMBERED ZION: INTRODUCTION 1 II WE’VE GOT TO SING IT TOGETHER: HYBRIDITY IN THE REGGAE TEXT (SLAVERY TO WWI) 43 III REQUIRED FROM US A SONG: TWENTIETH CENTURY MUSIC ON THE BLACK ATLANTIC 74 IV BY THE RIVERS OF BABYLON: JAMAICA TO TORONTO 95 V KING ALPHA’S SONG: PLACE AND MEANING IN TORONTO’S REGGAE TEXT 134 VI WORDS OF OUR MOUTHS: BUILDING THE BRIDGES 189 VII ACCEPTABLE IN THY SIGHT: BLACKNESS, WHITENESS AND REGGAE 225 VIII MEDITATIONS OF OUR HEART: IN SEARCH OF THE CANADIAN SOUND 255 IX A STRANGE LAND: CONCLUSION 290 – EPILOGUE 299 – APPENDIX A: Questionnaire A 302 – APPENDIX B: Questionnaire B 303 – APPENDIX C: The Reggae Cover Song Tradition 304 – APPENDIX D: Select Discography 326 – ENDNOTES 332 – BIBLIOGRAPHY 380 v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS First and foremost, I would like to thank Dr. Catharine Wilson for her supreme guidance and effort throughout this journey of mine. Dr. Wilson provided me with the necessary clues to make sense of what I had found, not to mention the kind direction I so required to articulate it here. I am also grateful for the efforts of Professors Alan Gordon, Barbara Lorenzkowski, David Monod, Bruce Muirhead, James St.G. Walker, and the late Rex M. Nettleford. Without their humbling expertise and thoughtful encouragement, this project would not have been possible. I greatly appreciated the financial assistance of the Social Science and Humanities Research Council Doctoral Scholarship and the Ontario Graduate Scholarships I received throughout the course of my study. I am likewise indebted to Vivian Crawford and all at the Jamaican Institute in Kingston, as I am to Professor Michael Tooley, Peter Kiernan, Janet Morgan, Sebastian Cook, Juli and Dave Genoa and Klive Walker for filling in so many blanks for me along the way. The journey began many years ago, and I have Professors Richard Reid and Henriette Donner to thank for recognizing a scholar lurking in the soul of this high-school dropout. This project is, of course, about the people and their music. I would like to thank the fifty one people that were willing to open up their hearts to me. It was an honour and a privilege to hear your stories. I hope that I got it right, or at the very least, got it close. I could not have managed without the support of my wife Alana. She is the best human-person I know. Finally, I would like to thank my Dad for convincing my Mom to immigrate to Toronto on 21 March 1966. And I’d like to thank my Mom for – at least vi that one time – listening to my Dad. In a hoose fou o’ Ayrshire folk, there was little doubt that I would grow up fiercely Scottish. But as a result of that brave move and, growing up where I did, alongside my dearest friends, I grew up a little Jamaican too. Walk Good! vii CHAPTER I WHEN WE REMEMBERED ZION: INTRODUCTION Canada is a place of impacting cultures. It is a nation where one culture often collides with another, yet over time, may come to share and observe similar values and cultural traits. The Jamaican experience in Toronto is no exception, revealing, as it does, a collision between migrant and host. Reggae music facilitated a cultural dialogue between Jamaican migrant and Canadian host in Toronto during the 1970s and 1980s. In relistening to the discourse and musical exchanges taking place along the city’s ethnic frontier at this time, we dial into a variety of social issues that were crucial to both migrant and host. These issues include: racism, the immigration and acculturation process, constructions of both ‘whiteness’ and ‘blackness’, and the host’s patent curiosity in Jamaican music and culture. All of these matters informed the evolution of an indigenous and multicultural Toronto reggae scene. Through reggae, migrants were at once able to enact their Jamaican ethnicity, and access, at least in some measure, the dominant society. In this sense, reggae was part of a successful acculturation strategy for the Jamaican migrant. At the same time, a significant segment of Toronto’s non-Jamaican (and mostly white) youth culture of the late 1970s and 1980s were, for a variety of reasons, drawn to the Jamaican music of their migrant friends. That music soon became an expected part of the city’s musical vernacular. Reggae is a hybrid. It is also a transnational popular music form. For over forty years, reggae’s trans-oceanic sound has relayed back and forth across the Black Atlantic with Jamaican migrants, labourers, domestics and, of course, musicians. It has at once articulated a Caribbean diasporic consciousness while transcending it, emerging as - 1 - something new in urban outposts like London, Birmingham and Toronto. It has, like ska before it, united sometimes seemingly strange bedfellows: Punk rockers, new wavers, rude boys and Rastafarians have all been brought together by this Jamaican music that has echoed down urban streetscapes, boomed across multiracial neighbourhoods, cut through working-class spaces of labour, enveloped the schoolyard, and claimed many night clubs. Crucially, reggae brought black and white youth together in Toronto in a sometimes highly-politicized, ‘oppositional’ movement that rebelled against the status quo of the late 1970s and 1980s.1 Since then, Jamaican reggae has leaped from the status of ‘folk music’ or ‘underground music’ to an international billion-dollar industry with a global infrastructure, millions of fans and thousands of artists of various ethnicities throughout the world. In terms of international popularity, and when compared to countries of similar size and population, Jamaica’s musical output is matchless. Reggae was not constrained to one place. Scholars have used the conceptual and interconnected frameworks of motion, encounter and identity to assess how cultural expressions (for our purposes: music) have been advanced and altered through communication routes that transcend national borders.2 Indeed, scholars from the black transnational study tradition have proven how ‘local’ is inextricably linked to ‘transnational’ or ‘global’ through systems of production and consumption and also through systems of thought and meaning.3 More recently, though, some scholars have demonstrated how an emphasis on globalization has perhaps overshadowed the uniqueness of the ‘local’.4 The ‘local’ remains, as various academics argued, crucial to studying memory-making, remembering and commemoration through the course of historical inquiry.5 This line of inquiry is not, - 2 - however, altogether new. As early as 1973, Clifford Geertz articulated his semiotic approach to culture that demonstrated how people are forever spinning webs of significance to make sense of and give meaning to the human experience.6 Establishing systems of meaning is, as Geertz observed, “as real and pressing as the more familiar biological needs.” 7 These systems of meaning produce culture and so become the collective property of a particular people in a particular place at a particular time.