The 1959 R&B single that inspired Jamaican ska
Credit: Far Out / Savannah Grandfather / Homini
Music, in an impressively general sense, owes a colossal debt to the revolutionary sounds that have been emerging from New Orleans for over a century. Perhaps its most unlikely impact, however, has been inspiring the entirety of Jamaica’s national soundtrack: ska.
The musical root of reggae, dub, and virtually every other sonic export of the Caribbean island since it won independence in 1962, ska music boasts an extensive and illustrious history. For the old days of Coxsone Dodd’s sound system, and artists like Prince Buster cutting lo-fi singles in ramshackled DIY recording studios, the sound of ska has spread across the globe, inspiring in its wake the 2-Tone movement that still defines the sound of the English Midlands, and the high-energy ska-punk that denoted America’s underground during the 1990s.
All of it, from Desmond Dekker to Operation Ivy, though, is apparently owed to the inspiration of one pioneering R&B record from New Orleans. Released in 1959, ‘Be My Guest’ was yet another R&B masterpiece to emerge from the fingertips of Fats Domino, the man who just years prior had laid the foundations for the explosion of the rock and roll revolution.
By the time ‘Be My Guest’ broke into the top ten of the US singles charts, the songwriter and pianist was arguably at the peak of his fame.
Crucially, that led the song to be played on virtually every radio station across the United States, including those that were close enough to the Caribbean for the musical obsessives of Jamaica to tune into the frequency. At that time, the island nation’s airwaves were dominated by American R&B, representing a bold new era of artistic expression and dance-focused rhythms; it is no surprise that Fats Domino was a favourite.
So influential was ‘Be My Guest’, in fact, that homegrown artists in Jamaica soon began to emulate the same R&B stylings as Fats. After being played extensively in Kingston’s sound system scene, the likes of Prince Buster, Laurel Aitken, and, later, Derrick Morgan and Desmond Dekker became infatuated with its musical excellence.
Given that Fats Domino’s output was so intrinsically linked to the sounds of New Orleans, though, a straight cover of the song by a Jamaican artist would sound rather odd. Instead, that first wave of ska artists took the root of the R&B sound, and added their own distinctive Caribbean twist, characterised by those infectious. off-beat rhythms.
From the inspiration of that 1959 single came a boom of emerging Jamaican artists during the early 1960s, soundtracking the era of Jamaican independence with a litany of pioneering ska classics. Multiple ska innovators, in fact, paid direct homage to the song, with the likes of Millie Small recording overt cover versions of Domino’s track.
Only a few years after ‘Be My Guest’ hit the Jamaican airwaves, the nation’s ska scene had become widespread enough for the American R&B to disappear from sound systems altogether, replaced by a sound more befitting of the Caribbean nation’s energy and spirit. Still, without Fats Domino and the entire generation of Jamaican artists who used his work as a starting pistol for their own innovations, the world might never have known the timeless charm of ska’s off-beat rhythm.
