“Right now I'm the musical spinner, who came down for dinner, an’ maybe I can be a winner, an’ never try to be a sinner” – U Roy, “Linger You Linger” 7", 1972

The great Jamaican deejay U Roy has died, but he certainly lived up to the epigram above in a career lasting nearly 60 years. Starting out on sound systems in the early 1960s, including Dickie Wong’s Dynamic, Sir George The Atomic and Coxsone Dodd’s Downbeat Number 2 Set, by 1969 he had come to define the art of talking over rhythm tracks with hits for Duke Reid like “Wake The Town”. At one time he occupied the top three positions on the Jamaican charts.

There had been others who deejayed on sound systems before, but U Roy took that style to an entirely higher level, setting the pattern for all who followed on the microphone. He was aided in this by the practice of leaving the unadorned rhythm track as the B side on a record. This created the space for deejays like U Roy to extemporise jive lyrics over these ‘versions’. When King Tubby’s innovations in the mix allowed him to develop what became known as dub, U Roy was still deejaying live on King Tubby’s Hi-Fi sound system, and again ruling the dances.

His first major influence – as he told me when I interviewed him in 1994 – was Winston Cooper aka Count Machuki. The deejay for Coxsone Dodd’s sound system in the 1950s, Machuki had been an avid reader of Harlem journalist Dan Burley’s magazine Jive, from which source he copped such phrases as “Love the life you live, and live the life you love”, and much more. These phrases lived on in U Roy’s jive talk, a direct link from Harlem to Kingston. Thus he became the creator of a new kind of MCing, and the deejay phenomenon took hold. For U Roy himself, this came almost as a surprise. “Tubby’s used to play a lot [of] Duke Reid music,” he told me. “It seems as if John Holt came to a Tubby’s dance one night an’ hear me deejaying one of his record, an’ go back to Duke Reid an’ tell ‘im. So Duke Reid tell Tubby’s he wan’ talk to me.” In spite of some reluctance, even trepidation – Duke Reid had some fairly dangerous characters in his posse – U Roy overcame those feelings and began recording for Reid. The first two tunes hit the Jamaican charts, and were followed shortly after by the third tune, an unprecedented success in the island’s musical history. As the late deejay-singer Scotty told me in 1991, “When U Roy came on the scene, he had serious impact!”

When Dom Sotgiu and I ran the Blood & Fire sound system sessions from 1998–2007, we had no idea that one day we would be in Japan, standing behind U Roy onstage while he thrilled Japanese reggae lovers in the cities of Tokyo, Osaka and Shizuoka. I had been a bit nervous about the sessions – after all, this was U Roy, the deejay originator – but when we all met up in the hotel in Tokyo, he soon put us at ease.

U Roy in person was a genuinely cool guy. To fans he was a legend, but as we came to know him on the tour, he was unassuming and humble to a fault. We explained that we wanted to do the sessions in the old way, a bit of the A side vocal, then flipping the record over for him to toast over the dub. I had mentioned before the first show that as U Roy’s contract called for him to do 45 minutes per session, we would play a few specials and some roots and ska tunes, before starting with rock steady. I said that when he heard us starting to play rock steady, he should make his way to the stage. So, after a couple of ska tunes, I selected The Wailers’ “Bend Down Low”, and Dom played it. At that point, U Roy came up on stage and began deejaying “Bob Marley and The Wailing Wailers say” and the vocal came in “Bend down low, let me tell you what I know”. Instant pull up – Dom rewound the tune and we started again.

From then on, everything was magic. We went through our selections in chronological order – we had Treasure Isle vocals (and the dub LPs) and some early reggae that hadn’t, to my knowledge, been done with U Roy before – “Night Owl”, “Soul Shakedown Party”, not tunes you’d associate with regular sound system play. I distinctly remember that as we played Ken Boothe’s “Freedom Street” – a well-worn classic – as the intro played, U Roy interjected “Come in Ken Boothe”, just as Ken started singing on the track – perfect timing. We continued with the Aquarius Dub album’s cut of Dennis Brown’s “Song My Mother Used To Sing” (with new lyrics, completely different to the 45 cut “Linger You Linger”). LP. That was followed by various Bunny Lee productions and some Channel One rockers, finishing up with rub-a-dub style from an old Coxsone dub LP. U Roy handled it all perfectly with that rich voice tone and his superb timing – and that first night stays engraved in my memory as perhaps the high point of my involvement in reggae music.

On the tour in Japan, U Roy was what I would call a proper gent – always relaxed and good humoured, never any hint of prima donna business. He was warm and kind, and I wish we could have done it all again. He said to us after that first night that “you guys make me feel young again”. We all ate our evening meals together, in various restaurants in the three cities, enjoying good company and interesting conversation. We moved around in Japan by bullet train, a fact that Daddy Roy incorporated into his lyric over the version of the Prince Tony cut of “Jah Jah Train”.

The following year, 2007, Dom and me went to Kingston, staying in Bunny Lee’s old house in Meadowbrook. U Roy was off the island until the day before we left, but on our last day Trinity drove me, Dom and Jah Stitch down to Cling Cling Avenue – we were all delighted to meet up again. I know that he will never be forgotten as long as Jamaican music plays, and I will certainly never forget; I am privileged to have known him.

U Roy aka Ewart Beckford OD 1942–2021

Subscribers to The Wire’s online archive can read a review of the Blood & Fire sound system’s 2000 date in San Francisco via Exact Editions here