STORY · REGGAE
From toasting to chatting: how the deejay took over
Well supported
The Jamaican deejay grew from a hype-man behind the selector into the star of the record.
A century-defining shift: the sound-system talker who once hyped the crowd became, by the 1970s, the voice selling the record.
The voice in the dance
Before the deejay was a star, he was a servant of the sound. On Sir Coxsone Downbeat and its rivals, men like Count Machuki and King Stitt worked the microphone to lift the crowd between records, jiving and rhyming over the instrumental. This live art, toasting, had no author on the label — it belonged to the night.
The ska years began to change that. Sir Lord Comic, a dancer turned talker, cut sides such as "Ska-ing West" that are counted among the first deejay records, carrying the sound-system voice into the studio.
Onto the record
The break came at the turn of the 1970s, when U-Roy rode Treasure Isle rocksteady rhythms to the top of the Jamaican chart. Suddenly the toast was the hit. Scotty, Dennis Alcapone, I-Roy and the philosophical Big Youth followed, each bending the style toward story, scripture or slackness.
The hype-man had become the headline.
The shift travelled. A Kingston-raised selector named Clive Campbell — DJ Kool Herc — took the sound-system idea of talking over breaks to the Bronx, where it fed the birth of rap. The deejay's rise is one of the through-lines of the whole music.