Gavin B.

Straight From the Horse's Mouth

The story of reggae's finest drummer: Leroy "Horsemouth" Wallace

I've never made a secret of the fact that Leroy "Horsemouth" Wallace is my favorite drummer reggaewise or otherwise. He's played in hundreds of studio sessions and toured with Gregory Isaacs, the Roots Radics, Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, Burning Spear, Yellowman and just about everybody who's anybody in reggae music.

Horsemouth is also the funniest and most intelligent reggae artist I've ever met. He's had me laughing to tears with some of his off-the-cuff observations about the absurdity of the world around him. He has an absolute attitude of joie de vivre toward everything in life.

The first video is a short drumming demonstration by Horsemouth



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Horsemouth gave a short speech in a scene the 1978 movie Rockers. He told me there was no script and he ad-lib his lines in the first take.



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In another scene from Rockers, Horsemouth is film with his dread bredren jammin' it down in de yard. Notice the song they're jamming on is Want To Make It With You, the 1970 hit by the pop group Bread.



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The final live video is of Horsemouth sitting in with the American reggae group Groundation for a ravin' version of Bob Marley's Trenchtown Rock. The video captures Horsemouth's charismatic stage presence and his rock solid mastery of the one-drop drumming style.



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There are two types of music: the first type is the blues and the second type is all the other stuff.
Townes Van Zandt

Gavin B.

Babylon Is Falling - The Music of Steel Pulse


David Hinds, singer/guitarist for Steel Pulse

Then in 1978, Steel Pulse, a Birmingham reggae unit thundered onto the UK music scene. What was unusual about Steel Pulse was they had as many punk rocker fans as Jamaican national reggae fans in London.

I visited London in 1978 and attended a Culture concert in Brixton and I was the only white person at the show. Two nights later, I saw Steel Pulse perform in a punk club in London and there were more white fans in the audience than black fans. Clearly, Steel Pulse had built a bridge between London's white punk rock community & the black Jamaican reggae community. It was the first bi-racial reggae music concert I'd ever seen, outside of a Bob Marley show.

David Hinds on the origins of the Steel Pulse name:
Steel Pulse initially had difficulty finding live gigs, as club owners were reluctant to give them a platform for their "subversive" Rastafarian politics. Luckily, the punk movement was opening up new avenues for music all over Britain, and also finding a spiritual kinship with protest reggae. Thus, the group wound up as an opening act for punk and new wave bands like the Clash, the Stranglers, Generation X, the Police, and XTC, and built a broad-based audience in the process.

Steel Pulse's biggest break was being designated as the supporting band for Bob Marley's European tour in 1978. The twelve-date tour included sold-out concerts in Paris, Ibiza, Gothenburg, Stockholm, Oslo, Rotterdam, Amsterdam, Brussels and kicked off with an outdoor festival at the New Bingley Hall in Stafford (Marley later released an album culled from some of the live shows, Babylon By Bus.)

David Hinds recalls:
Handsworth Revolution - Steel Pulse - Handsworth refers to the Handsworth district of Birmingham England which is the home of Steel Pulse. The 1978 album of the same name rocketed Steel Pulse to global noteriety as a band.



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Ku Klux Klan - Steel Pulse Steel Pulse's first single for Island Records was the classic "Ku Klux Klan," which happened to lend itself well to the band's highly visual, costume-heavy concerts. I saw Steel Pulse in London, New York and Boston in 1980 and the band was at the peak of their power as a live band. This clip of Steel Pulse playing "Ku Klux Klan" live at the Rainbow Theatre London, England September 18th, 1980 captures that energy. This was also included in the film Urgh! A Music War.



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Babylon Makes the Rules - Steel Pulse= A hit in 1979, and got a lot play on a lot of sound systems in London, Kingston, Paris and New York. This video was recorded at a NYC show during their 1979 American tour.



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Roller Skates- Steel Pulse- Roller Skates may be the most requested Steel Pulse song ever. It's the epic saga of a roller skating rastaman who gets his wireless boom-box stolen by a big "cigar smoking" man in a flashy car and how the rasta becomes a ninja hero in his quest to recover his stolen boom-box.



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There are two types of music: the first type is the blues and the second type is all the other stuff.
Townes Van Zandt

Gavin B.

Mutabaruka - Dark Prince of Dub Poetry


Mustabaruka- The nightmare of every white, middle class, god fearing Christian

Mutabaruka is the nightmare of every white, middle class, god fearing Christian. Muta has a larger than life, confrontational personae even when he's off stage. In 1984 I was assigned by the Channel Club to be Muta's driver for his one night appearance at the Channel in Boston.

It was his first appearance in the United States and Muta came off the Air Jamaica flight at Logan Airport, wearing Rastafarian robes and was barefoot. He certainly turned a lot of heads as we walked from the terminal to my car in the parking garage. I'm still not sure how Muta ever got onto an international flight without wearing any shoes.

As I drove him from the airport to his hotel destination in Cambridge, between Central Square and Harvard Sqaure, a Cambridge cop began following us, and at the bottom of Dunster Street he pulled me over for running a stop sign. The only problem was that there was no stop sign at the intersection and Muta proceeded to get into a heated argument with the cop on my behalf to keep the cop from issuing me a ticket.

A crowd of Harvard students began to gather around the scene and soon it turned into a bit of a protest spectacle led by Muta. The cop radioed the station house and reinforcements and a German Shepherd attack dog were used to disperse the mob of about 50 Harvard students.

The upshot of the story was that Muta spent his first night in the USA in jail on peace disturbance charges and I ended up bailing him out at 8 am the next morning, using the services of my own personal attorney, who couldn't figure out what the hell was going on with this dreadlocked wild man who dressed in robes and wore no shoes. Meanwhile the cops at the station house acted as if they captured the black version of the Unabomber and had plastered copies of the Mutabaruka concert posters they confiscated from my car all over the station house like some sort of law enforcement trophies.

The fact that Mutabaruka exists is a crime in the mind of a lot of white folks and Muta was never reluctant to point out that grim reality to his audiences, and encouraged them to confront the racism of Babylon.

Whiteman Country- Mutabaruka In Whiteman Country warns his black Jamaican bredren living in the UK that "it no good to stay a white man's country too long."



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Johnny Drughead - Mutabaruka-Johnny Drughead is an update of the classic reggae song Johnny Too Bad in which Johnny moves from Jamaica to NYC and falls into drug trafficking. Muta's character, Johnny Drughead ends up wasted on cocaine and becomes just another drug casualty dead on the streets of New York City.



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Dis Poem- Mutabaruka- Dis Poem is from a poetry recital performance by Muta on the cable show, Def Jam Poetry. It was recorded about 10 or 12 years ago.



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There are two types of music: the first type is the blues and the second type is all the other stuff.
Townes Van Zandt

Gavin B.

Sleng Teng & the Globalization of Music

An editorial by Gavin B.



The rise of King Jammy's sleng teng riddim ended the 12 year rule of the one drop riddim in the dancehalls with the digital (or digi) riddim. Reggae mutated into another subgenre under the amophous umbrella of "worldbeat" music which blended elements of hip hop,international, socca, reggae and even synth pop.

Sometimes in our haste to move on to the next big thing, we forget about what was really great about the last big thing. Such is the case with the rise of the sleng teng riddim craze in Jamaica which all but pushed roots reggae out of the picture in the mid Eighties.

Digi riddims refer to riddims created around the time that Jamaican producers began to use the drum machine and the ubiquitous Casio synthesizer. Three major digi riddims, sleng teng, ragga (or raggamuffin) and raggaeton began to displace Carelton Barrett's organic one drop to the snare riddim he developed with the Upsetters.

The song that began this mind numbing synthesizer dance craze was Wayne Smith's 1986 smash hit Sleng Teng Riddim. It's not rastaman, nor roots reggae... it's souless dance music for the Attention Deficit Disordered.



It's hard to believe that such an inane dance ditty would bring down the entire roots reggae musical idiom....But nobody looked back after the rise of the sleng teng & critics were all too quick to pronounce roots reggae dead on arrival. The next big thing had arrived, and even if it was lame, reggae music was the last big thing and therefore obsolete.

Producers, instead of performers, became front and center with the rise of digi riddims and skilled musicians playing old school roots reggae became irrelevant to both the production of and the performance of music. It was far cheaper to produce an album using canned soundboard riddims rather than having to hire an entire band of backup musicians to play in a recording session. And guess what?...Music producers got a much bigger cut of the royalties by eliminating the need for session players.

In the early Nineties the major American and British record labels were all too happy to drop roots reggae artists from their labels. In the late Seventies, the major labels saw reggae music as the latest gold mine but by the late Eighties record company executives were disappointed by the sales of reggae music. As it turned out, only Bob Marley & Peter Tosh sold millions of records worldwide, while other reggae artists were lucky to sell 100,000 units of their latest albums. 100,000 units is a respectable sales figure, but not good enough in a world where Michael Jackson & Whitney Houston were selling 30 million units of their latest album product.

Sometimes we forget that the production of music is driven by the all mighty corporate dollar...And we're deluding ourselves if we think that music is a special force of nature that transcends the even more powerful force of global capitalism. It's all about the money, honey...Musical generosity and artistic integrity was over with when Woody Guthrie died in a New Jersey hospital with Huntington's disease. John Lydon was right, it's all a big corporate swindle.

I don't like the post-reggae era (from 1986 and beyond) any more than I like music from the post-rock era. Nearly all of the real authentic roots genres of popular music have devolved into digitized parodies of the real thing. Even electronica and dub music have become subgenres of "dance music" in the music marketing nomenclature.

The end result is the globalization of all music. All genres of music are beginning to sound like they were produced using the same banal mass produced template. Pop music sounds like pop music, ethnic music sounds like pop music, rock sounds like pop music, rap music sounds like pop music, blues sounds like pop music and even country music sound like pop music.

We're all heading to toward the inevitable day when all music sounds like it's come off the same slick factory production line and all of those outlying fringe subgeneres will be consumed by globalization just as roots reggae was.

There's still the remote possibility that the music consumer might rise up demand real authentic music instead of crappy pop digitized dance music. The jury is still out, but the future of music looks pretty grim from where I'm standing.

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There are two types of music: the first type is the blues and the second type is all the other stuff.
Townes Van Zandt

Gavin B.

Ina Soulful Style- Jimmy and Tarras Riley


Father & son, Jimmy & Tarrus Riley singing at the 2008 Reggae Sunsplash

Jimmy Riley and his son Tarrus Riley have both had successful solo careeers but frequently appear and record as a duo in Jamaica. Jimmy and Tarrus rocked Sunsplash 2008 with a take no prisoners performance.

Jimmy Riley was born Martin James Norman Riley on May 22, 1954 in Jones Town, Jamaica. His first success came as a member of The Sensations (with Cornell Campbell, Aaron "Bobby" Davis, and his older brother, Buster Riley), who recorded such hits as "Everyday Is Just a Holiday" for Duke Reid's Treasure Isle label in the mid-1960s. Riley was just ten years old when he began performing with the Sensations.

Riley left the Sensations in 1967 and as a solo singer and writer, Riley worked with a host of Jamaican producers, including Bunny Lee and Lee "Scratch" Perry, before settling in with Sly and Robbie.

Jimmy was deeply influenced by the music of American R&B singers like Otis Redding, Curtis Mayfield and Sam Cooke.

Sexual Healing - Jimmy Riley This stunning cover of Marvin Gaye's tune rocked the dancehalls in 1981 and shows Jimmy's affinity for American R&B. He is backed by the deep grooves of Sly & Robbie's Taxi crew.



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My Woman's Love - Jimmy Riley- My Woman's Love was a little known Curtis Mayfield song that Jimmy transformed into a big hit in Jamaica in 1980. It was also recorded at Taxi Studio at a time when Sly and Robbie were refining their bottom heavy sledgehammer drum and bass style that later became the signature sound of Black Uhuru.



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One of the most promising of the second generation of Jamaica roots reggae singers, Tarrus Riley is the son of Jimmy Riley. Like his father, Riley has a sweet, nuanced tenor vocal style, although his first connection with the Jamaican music scene was as a DJ (under the name Taurus). Riley taught himself to play keyboards and several percussion instruments and began writing his own songs, many of which had strong Rastafarian and consciousness-leaning themes.

She's Royal is a 2007 single release by Tarras.



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There are two types of music: the first type is the blues and the second type is all the other stuff.
Townes Van Zandt

Gavin B.

Three Dancehall Killer Hits


An outdoor dancehall in the bush country of Jamaica

Billie Jean- Shinehead This version of Michael Jackson's Billie Jean complete with Ennio Morricone style whistling was a big dancehall hit in 1984. Shinehead (Edmund Carl Aiken) was normally a sound system deejay and toaster but he sounded eerily like the King of Pop on this Jackson tribute. Whether Shinehead was toasting or crooning or flat-out rapping, he always balanced his material between the positive and socially conscious with more lighthearted sentiments. Shinehead was born in London of Jamaican parents and moved to Brooklyn as a youth. He got his start by performing at New York sound systems events in the early '80s. His cover of Michael Jackson's Billie Jean, truly got his career rolling. Shinehead currently divides his time living in both and NYC and Jamaica.



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Roll It Gal - Alison Hinds- Alison Hinds is from Barbados and currently lives in London. She is currently the top ranking female singer all over the Caribbean, including Jamaica. Alison sings a rasta conciouness blend of soca and reggae. She is taking soca places it had never been before and has major record labels in both the UK and the USA interested. Her first solo track, the empowering woman anthem Roll It Gal, appeared in 2005 and topped the charts in Barbados, Trinidad, and Jamaica.



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Murderer- Barrington Levy- Murderer first appeared on the Jamaican issued showcase album, Barrington Levy Meets Frankie Paul which I purchased in 1984. Strangely enough, the song didn't receive much attention early on, but when I visited Jamaica two years later, in 1986, in was a wall-to-wall smash hit on every sound system from Mo Bay to Kingston. Barrington Levy Meets Frankie Paul was culled from sessions produced by Henry Junjo Lawes and nearly every track on the lp became a monster hit in JA over the next couple of years. The album is currently out of print and has never been issued in cd form in the United States.


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There are two types of music: the first type is the blues and the second type is all the other stuff.
Townes Van Zandt

Gavin B.

Three Sufferer's Tales

Babylon - Sugar Minott- Babylon is an early dancehall hit recorded by Sugar in his early days at Channel One. Babylon appeared on Hard Time Pressure, one of Sugar's finest album. It's a killer cut ina dance hall stylee. The backing band sounds a lot like the Roots Radics and the producer may be Junjo Lawes. I don't know for sure because I could never find any log sheets for the album session. Maybe some fanatical reggae fan can help me out.



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Peeni Walli - Eek A Mouse This 1984 single is a comical suffer's tale written by Eek about his crash with a motorcycle when he was riding his bike one day. Peeni walli is Jamaican patios for a firefly. The lyrics are quite imaginative:

Lyrics to Penni Walli by Eek A Mouse

Riding on my bicycle
Got knocked down by a motorcycle
In front of a motor vehicle
Luckily, I was Jah Jah disciple

I lay on the ground I was so injured
So unconscious, did not know what to do :/

Yeah, man!
When the bike really hit me
I see stars and peeni walli
Beddameng! - pain all over me
Me tink me get shocked by electricity
Beddameng!

I lay on the ground I was so injured
So unconscious, did not know what to do :/

Yeah, man!
Me say at the public hospital
Crowd gather around like it was a funeral, 'ey!
Some say it accidental
or the lang youth ha look 'pon a fat gal



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G.P. - Gregory Isaacs- G.P. is shorthand for General Penitentiary, Jamaica's principal maximum security prison, located in downtown Kingston near the harbor. Gregory was no stranger to G.P., having done time for both herbs smuggling and possession of illegal firearms. In fact Gregory's career was seriously affected by his periodical stints in G.P. His first stint came at just as his music was breaking through in the USA and the UK but he was incarcerated and couldn't tour.

After that Gregory spent a couple years unable to tour outside of Jamaica because of his undesirable status with both US and UK immigration. When I finally saw him live in the USA, it was 1985 and US Department of Immigration would only allow him a three day tourist visa which precluded any serious touring outside of gigs in Boston, New York and a few other Eastern Seaboard cities of the USA. It was sad because when Gregory could finally tour without any kind of travel constraints, his fleeting moment as a cultural zeitgeist of reggae music had passed.


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There are two types of music: the first type is the blues and the second type is all the other stuff.
Townes Van Zandt

Gavin B.

Ina 2 Tone Style

Jerry Dammers of the ska revival band The Specials started the short lived but iconic 2 Tone record label in 1979. It spawned a cultural movement, which was popular among skinheads, rudies and some mod revivalists. The label stopped operating in 1986. In the first year of it’s operation, 2 Tone Records signed The Selecter, Madness and The Beat, but they all left within two years. 2 Tone Records acts signed a contract that allowed them to leave the label after releasing just one single, which was unusual in the record industry. Madness and The Beat both took advantage of this clause; the former to sign to Stiff Records, and the latter to start their own label, Go Feet Records.


The Specials

Most of the 2 Tone bands were racially mixed and played a big role in a UK ska revival and the renewed interest in rock steady, blue beat, and roots reggae music in England. Many white band members were products the early punk scene in England which always had a symbiotic relationship with reggae music. When I visited London in 1980, I was amazed the amount of cultural overlap between the post punk movement and the reggae music scene in England.

The reason why 2 Tone became more than just a curious footnote to reggae music history was because the 2 Tone bands delivered the musical goods as live bands and the influence 2nd wave ska revival has remained significant, 30 years after the fact.

I was a skeptic when I first got wind of a ska music revival in England on the post-punk club scene. When I saw the Specials, the Beat, Selector and Madness play live shows in both London and New York I became a believer. Every one of the 2 Tone bands played so well that any question of racial authenticity became a moot point.


Peter Tosh served as the model for the 2 Tone man

The distinctive Jerry Dammers designed 2 Tone logo portrays a man in a black suit, white shirt, black tie, pork pie hat, white socks and black loafers. The fictional character was based on a photograph of Peter Tosh, during his rude boy days with the early Wailers.

2 Tone had two good years as a social movement and nearly all the first wave revival bands broke up by 1983, but the ska music refuses to die.


The Beat (known in the USA as the "English" Beat).

Whine & Grind/Stand Down Margaret - The Beat The twin towers of the Beat were toaster Ranking Roger and Saxa. Ranking Roger was a nimble and imaginative black toaster in the JA style who came up through the punk club scene and Saxa was a 50 year old veteran of the Jamaican ska scene who played with both the Desmond Dekker band and Prince Buster. The multiracial band carved a distinct sound through the use of alternating lead vocals by guitarist Dave Wakeling and Ranking Roger, supported by a tight band consisting of Andy Cox (guitar), David Steele (bass), and Everett Moreton (drums). The Beat was an awesome live band at the time of their debut album but Saxa departed due to the Beat's rigorous touring schedule. I Just Can't Stop It was the most musically accomplished album of the ska revival and over 30 years later the album remains a timeless masterpiece of punky reggae.

Stand Down Margaret is the Beat's acerbic condemnation of the right wing policies of British prime minister Margaret Thatcher.




The Beat logo

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Pauline Black & the Selecter

Too Much Pressure - The Selecter- The Selecter didn't achieve as much notoriety as other 2 Tone bands during ska revival of the early '80s. The Selecter recorded one of the finest albums of 2nd wave ska revival and deserved better than they got. The Selecter's biggest musical asset was lead singer Pauline Black, arguably the best lead singer of the ska revival. The members of the Selecter hailed from Coventry which was also the home of the Specials. Selecter is the Jamaican term for the sound system deejay who selects the records played by a sound system at a dancehall event.



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Madness hails from the Camden section of London

One Step Beyond -Madness The Madness recording of One Step Beyond takes the Prince Buster ska classic one step beyond the musical anarchy of the Prince's original. As it turns out, Madness has been a huge influence on 3rd wave ska bands.

Madness reinvented themselves as a conventional rock band and had a fair amount of success in the USA, later in the decade. The best songs of Madness contained a great deal witty commentary on British working class life like the Kinks, Squeeze and XTC.



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Monkey Man- The Specials Without Jerry Dammers and the Specials there would have never been a 2 Tone Records nor a 2nd wave ska revival in the UK. Their live shows were frenetic and anarchic, often ending with the half the audience dancing on the stage with the band.

The Dammers-designed logos, based in '60s pop art with black and white checks, gave the label an instantly identifiable look. Dammers' eye for detail and authenticity also led to the band adopting '60s-period rude-boy outfits (porkpie hats, tonic and mohair suits, and loafers). This cover of the Maytal's Monkey Man first appeared on their Elvis Costello produced debut album.

Embeded below is a killer performance of Monkey Man at the 2009 Glastonbury Music Festival. It's a bit eerie... Jerry Dammers looks as if he's hardly aged since 1979.



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There are two types of music: the first type is the blues and the second type is all the other stuff.
Townes Van Zandt

Gavin B.

A New Generation of Dub

As much as the audience for roots reggae music has ebbed over the past 20 or so years, there has been a growing interest in all kinds of dub music. Remixers, techno sound system operators, trip hop artists along with producers and performers in the techno/electronica world have rekindled the public interest in dub and inevitably the road of dub always leads the traveller to the palace of roots reggae.

Tribal War - Little Roy and Adrian Sherwood This electrifying live performance was filmed at the Independent Dub Day concert.



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Goin' Under - Rocker's Hi Fi with Kruder and Dorfmeister This stark and sinister K&D remix of a Rocker's Hi-Fi loop was one of the earliest hits of post-millennium dub from the trip hop school. While technically not a reggae song, Goin' Under was a genre splitting tune that enjoyed a lot of play in dance clubs. The song is also featured in the 2000 Academy Award winning film, Traffic.



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Massive Attack

The Man Next Door - Massive Attack This song was originally hit in Jamaica for Paragon's vocalist John Holt during the mid 60s. Massive Attack, however, would look closer to home for their inspiration, incorporating elements of two definitive versions from musicians directly influential to their sound: a 1981 Sly & Robbie-powered dub version, and version by Slits, punk rock's original riot grrrls.

Using these tracks to keep themselves in check, Massive Attack recorded what is perhaps the best-ever rendition of the song. Keeping a muddy, dubbed-out bass of Slits-ian proportion to drive the song, and they also sampled the drip-drip guitar from the Cure's "10:15 on a Saturday Night" and dropped it prominently into the song to punctuate the bridge.

Reggae music veteran Horace Andy, whose own original version of the song is one of its finest early airings, then reprised his vocals to great effect. With Massive Attack's atmospheric retooling, the song has a menacing quality of veiled threat against a noisy neighbor.

Give thanks and praise and listen in awe... Massive Attack is the past, present and future of popular music.

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There are two types of music: the first type is the blues and the second type is all the other stuff.
Townes Van Zandt

Gavin B.

Ina Turbo-Charged Style- Black Uhuru


Black Uhuru

Black Uhuru was founded by Don Carlos and Duckie Simpson in the mid Seventies and became the premier reggae band of the post-Marley era.

From 1980 through 1984 Black Uhuru recorded nine albums that redefined modern roots reggae. Since 1980, drummer Sly Dunbar and Robbie Shakespeare have supplied the turbo-charged drum and bass to the Black Uhuru riddim. Sly and Robbie remain charter members of both the recording and touring unit of Black Uhuru. The frontline of Black Uhuru has changed over the years, but Sly and Robbie were element of Uhuru's sound that remained unchanged for almost 30 years.

The most productive edition of the Black Uhuru was the unit that featured singing trio of Duckie Simpson, Puma Jones and Michael Rose.

The crown jewel of their musical output was 1983's Anthem which won a Grammy and acheived crossover success in the USA and the UK. In early 1985 at the peak of their success, lead vocalist Michael Rose left Black Uhuru over creative differences.

Rose was replaced by Junior Reid but Junior's visa problems kept him from touring with the band outside of Jamaica. Puma Jones left the band in 1987 to fight a struggle against cancer and she died in 1990. In 2001 Black Uhuru returned to the studio with Michael Rose sound-alike Andrew Beckford and Puma Jones sound-alike Pam Hall and recorded Dynasty which recalled Uhuru's glory days but has been silent since then.

Choosing just three songs that reflect the glory of Black Uhuru is like trying to summarize Bob Marley's legacy with three songs. I decided to pick one track from each from their three most crucial albums Red (1981), Chill-Out (1982) and Anthem (1984).

The Youth of Englington- Black Uhuru This is a live performance of the anchor song on the album Red and it gives you a pretty good idea of the power of their live performances. The performance was in Grugahalle Essen, Germany on October 17th 1981.



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Right Stuff- Black Uhuru This song is from 1982's Chill Out an album which saw Uhuru using more state of art electronica techniques including the innovative use of the vocoder to process the background vocals. But despite the innovation, the sledgehammer one drop riddim of Sly and Robbie's drum n' bass keep Uhuru's is firmly rooted in roots reggae.



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Black Uhuru Anthem - Black Uhuru Black Uhuru Anthem was a dubwise declaration of faith in rasta in these times of sufferation. The song's power is underscored by Michael Rose's melancholy incantation of the stark lyrics.



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There are two types of music: the first type is the blues and the second type is all the other stuff.
Townes Van Zandt