STORY · REGGAE
Drums they didn't want on air
Well supported
Rastafari drumming came down from the Wareika Hills and onto record while colonial-era radio kept its distance.
The story of how burru and Nyabinghi drumming reached Jamaican records through Count Ossie, against a broadcasting culture wary of Rastafari sound and imagery.
A camp in the hills
Above East Kingston, in the Wareika Hills, Count Ossie gathered drummers and carried the African-derived burru tradition into the ceremonial pulse of Rastafari Nyabinghi. It was music of a faith the colonial establishment viewed with suspicion, made by people it often treated as outcasts.
In 1960 those drums crossed into the recording studio. Prince Buster brought Ossie's players to back the Folkes Brothers on 'Oh Carolina', and a Rastafari rhythm suddenly sat inside a pop hit. It was a breakthrough, and to some ears a provocation.
The reluctant airwaves
Broadcasting was cautious. Stations such as the JBC and RJR leaned toward a respectable, often foreign-facing playlist, and Rasta-associated sound and imagery sat uneasily within it, part of the broader pattern of colonial-era airplay restriction. The wariness cannot be separated from the era's hostility toward Rastafari, sharpened by episodes like Coral Gardens in 1963.
The drum that scared the studio became the heartbeat of the nation's music.
The music did not wait for permission. By 1973 Count Ossie and the Mystic Revelation of Rastafari put a full ceremony on wax with Grounation, and writers like Verena Reckord traced the line from the hills to the heart of reggae, insisting that what radio once shunned was Jamaican culture itself.