STORY · REGGAE
Toasting and the mic
Probable
How the sound-system deejay's live talk-over became recorded art.
From Count Machuki to U-Roy and Big Youth, the deejay's mic style moved from the dance onto record and reshaped popular music.
Toasting grew directly out of Jamaica's sound-system culture, where a selector's spoken commentary over the records kept the crowd moving. Count Machuki (Winston Cooper), working sound systems in the late 1950s, is widely credited as the first deejay to make that talk-over a real performance - drawing on American radio DJ patter and jive talk to hype records live. The style stayed mostly a dancehall-only skill until 1970, when U-Roy released "Wake the Town," produced by Duke Reid and King Tubby: it made him a chart star in his own right, with three songs in the Jamaican Top 10 at once, and proved a deejay's chanted rhymes could carry a record like a singer's lyrics. Through the 1970s, deejays including I-Roy, Prince Jazzbo and Big Youth pushed the style further, adding Rasta-influenced lyrics and a deeper, bass-heavy delivery - a lineage that runs in a straight line to reggae toasting's role in the birth of hip-hop.
Toasting lineage: Wikipedia; jamaicanlifeandtravel.com on Count Machuki; Wax Poetics on U-Roy. "Father of deejaying" is a contested title across several pioneers (Machuki, King Stitt, U-Roy) - treated here as a lineage, not a single-inventor claim.