STORY · REGGAE
Quiet names of the toasting era
Probable
Behind U-Roy, Big Youth and Dennis Alcapone stood toasters whose records shaped the style but whose names rarely make the standard histories.
A look at toasting pioneers who cut sides at Treasure Isle and Channel One alongside the genre's best-known names, and how their catalogues still surface in reissue culture today.
Beyond the famous names
Standard accounts of 1970s toasting move quickly from U-Roy's breakthrough to a short list of stars: I-Roy, Big Youth, Dennis Alcapone. That shortlist is accurate as far as commercial impact goes, but the studios were busier than the hit parade suggests, and a wider circle of deejays worked the same rhythms for smaller but real catalogues.
Lizzy (Delroy Petgrave) was one of Dennis Alcapone's regular sparring partners at Treasure Isle, the pair trading lines over Duke Reid's rock steady and early reggae rhythms for engineer Byron Smith. Their 1973 session, later reissued as Soul To Soul: D.J.'s Choice, is one of the clearest surviving records of the two-deejay 'combination' format that toasting grew out of.
The catalogue runs deeper than the compilations suggest.
A little later, Prince Hammer (Berris Simpson) moved from deejaying on the Vee-Jay sound system to running his own labels, Gold Cup and Belva, out of a record shop on Orange Street. At Channel One, Sly & Robbie built him a rhythm for free for 'Ten Thousand Lions'; he went on to produce sides for Glen Brown's circle of artists and, on the strength of the Virgin-licensed Bible set, reached a UK audience most Jamaican-only toasters of his generation never did.
Neither Lizzy nor Prince Hammer displaced the genre's marquee names, and neither should. Their records show how thick the toasting scene was at ground level: shared studios, shared engineers, shared rhythms, and a constant traffic of deejays cutting sides that only later, selectively, got remembered as 'the classics'.