Augustus Pablo :: El Rocker's > Who Say Jah No Dread

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Who Say Jah No Dread

Jacob Miller

Tracklist

1	Keep On Knocking [Vocal] (H. Swaby/ J. Miller)
2	Knocking Version [Dub] (H. Swaby)
3	False Rasta [Vocal] (H. Swaby/ J. Miller)
4	Hungry Town Scanc [Dub] (H. Swaby)
5	Baby I Love You So [Vocal] (H. Swaby/ J. Miller)
6	King Tubby Meets Rockers Uptown [Dub] (H. Swaby)
7	Who Say Jah No Dread [Vocal] (H. Swaby/ J. Miller)
8	Jah Dread [Dub] (H. Swaby)
9	Each One Teach One [Vocal] H. Swaby/ J. Miller)
10	Each One Teach One Version [Dub] (H. Swaby)
11	Girl Name Pat [Vocal] (H. Swaby/ J. Miller)
12	Girl Name Pat Version [Dub] (H. Swaby)

Credits

Producer(s)	Augustus Pablo for Rockers Productions
Engineer(s)	King Tubby
Studio(s)	Randy's (recorded) Dynamic Studios (recorded) King Tubby's (voiced & mixed)
Label(s)	Greensleeves GREL166, GRELCD166 RAS RCD003
Recorded	1974-1975
Released	1992

Musicians

Augustus Pablo	Melodica, piano, clavinet, organ
Aston "Family Man" Barrett Robert "Robbie" Shakespeare Leroy "Heptones" Sibbles	Bass
Carlton "Carlie" Barrett Lloyd "Tinleg" Adams	Drums
Earl "Chinna" Smith Reggie Lewis	Guitar
Richard "Dirty Harry" Hall	Tenor saxophone
Bobby Ellis	Trumpet
Vincent "Don D Junior" Gordon	Trombone

Notes

Produced by King Selassie I through His Divine powers working thorough I and I to manifest these inspirations.

Track notes

Baby I Love You So

lyric

Notes

From the book: Reggae. The Rough Guide. 100 essential CDs

In 1968 Vocalist Al Campbell discovered Jacob Miller at the age of 13, singing in the schoolyard.
Campbell, who sang for Studio One, took him straight down to Brentford Road, where young Jacob auditioned for Coxsone Dodd.

Recognizing his talent immediately, Dodd recorded two songs. Only one, the plaintive rock steady ballad "Love Is A Message", was issued.
The other - "My Girl Has Left Me" - used Larry Marshall's "Nanny Goat" rhythm; at this time, Dodd remained unconvinced of its new sound, and had yet to release Marshall's cut.

Shortly thereafter, Jacob recorded "What More Can I Do" for Bunny Lee, written for him by the Cables.
Miller didn't record again until 1974, when he started to sing for innovative roots producer Augustus Pablo.

"Who Say Jah No Dread" showcases six songs, and the corresponding dub versions, that they created during sessions in 1974 and 1975, and released as singles on Pablo's Rockers label.
In 1976, Jacob went on to make local hits like "Tenement Yard" and the pro-herb "Tired Fe Lick Weed In A Bush", plus commercially oriented sides like "All Night 'Til Daylight", his 1976 Song Festival entry.

Miller was then singing with Inner Circle, who released two albums on US Capitol in 1976 and 1977, and were a very strong live act.
From 1976 onwards, Inner Circle made a series of records for Tommy Cowan's Arab label, which like their later releases on Top Ranking were very popular in Jamaica.

Just how popular is demonstrated by the fact that Miller and Inner Circle were billed above Bob Marley and the Wailers for the famous 1978 Peace Concert in Kingston.
That year, they signed with Island, releasing the commercially successful "Everything Is Great" album, which they followed up with "New Age Music" in 1979.

Jacob also appeared memorably in the reggae movie "Rockers".
Everything looked set for the future, but the promise was not to be fulfilled.
Returning from a recording session, Miller crashed his car into a tree and was killed instantly.
His death (and the loss to reggae) was overshadowed by that of Bob Marley the following year, but Miller would surely have gone on to bigger and wider success.

Though Jacob's talent is abundantly evident on "Who Say Jah No Dread", his is not the only light that shines.
The rhythms, constructed by Pablo and musicians including the Barrett brothers, Leroy Sibbles, Robbie Shakespeare, Earl "Chinna" Smith, as well as Pablo himself on keyboards and melodica, are superb.

In addition, King Tubby was in absolute control at the mixing desk, creating astonishing, heart-stopping mixes that envelop the strong youthful tenor on the vocals, and wring every nuance from the supremely heavyweight rhythms on the dub versions.
Miller's singing is strikingly mature for his age; he was only seventeen when he first recorded for Pablo, but he already had his own style, albeit inspired like so many others by Dennis Brown.

Although in later years Miller was prone to an over-reliance on stutters and warbles to punctuate his vocals - in JA parlance, his "slurs" - such tendencies are barely noticeable here.
Of the three expressive love songs here, the best known is "Baby I Love You So", the basis of the legendary dub "King Tubby Meets Rockers Uptown" (presented in a different mix from the usually anthologized version).

Three equally vibrant roots tunes - "False Rasta", "Who Say Jah No Dread", and "Each One Teach One" qualify as some of the most deeply felt Rasta-themed music of the 1970s.

This album truly does live up to its subtitle - "Classic Augustus Pablo Sessions".

:: Steve Barrow & Peter Dalton

CD sleeve notes

Take a stop backwards.
Several stops backwards.
It is the early '70s, In Kingston, Jamaica.
Everywhere, the tricksy rhythm of skank swanks out into the streets, a liberated music with the artists in control.
As much as the artists are ever in control, that is.
The music has a proud, unbowed tempo, and hangs in the air like a cloud of exhaled ganja smoke.
It's the sound of a hopeful Jamaica.
Maybe it was unrealistic, but it seemed then that maybe the outsider could win a few races.

A young, slightly podgy kid is, looking for a way into the music business. He keeps on knocking, but only ono door opens: that of Coxsons Dodd's Studio One in Brantford Road, Kingston. One squeaky-voiced single later, the door slams shut on the kid again.

There was to be a long interval before he would enter a studio again, and when he did, it wouldn't be Studio One, perhaps leaving Mr Dodd to rue the rare day that he wasn't quite sharp enough to cut an entire album on a talented child.
The single, "Love Is A Message", vanished into the ether, only to be re-pressed when the kid's name, Jacob Miller, was one to be reckoned with.
Miller was only eight at the time of its recording, living with his grandmother at Collins Green in the Crossroads area of Kingston.

Today, it's hard to imagine Jacob Miller as anything other than the big-framed, huge-voiced, massive personality that fought his way to the very top of the Jamiacan music business in the mld-70's.
Miller dominated his time, even replacing Bob Marley as Jamaica's favourite while The Gong was temporarily abroad after political factionalism had caused a few bullets to lodge in his body.
But Miller wasn't always larger than life: a couple of years after the false start with Studio One, he became a part of Augustus Pablo's fledging Rockers organisation and began to learn his trade.

The records he cut with Pablo at the production helm may not have been Jacob Miller's biggest hits (for those, look to Inner Circle), but no-one could question their artistic merit. Astonishingly, they're collected for the first time here.
As - you've no doubt already hoard, they have a power that echoes down the years like nothing also Miller ever recorded.

"Jacob was my good friend too even though I was older than him, just like Hugh Mundell" recalls Pablo today.
In fact Miller was the first of a series of teenage talents that Pablo encouraged and tutored: Hugh Mundell, Yamie Bolo and White Mice, amongst others, followed later.
"I knew about Jacob from the record he made when he was a little youth. I used to play the record on my set (the Rockers Sound System)."

Pablo remembers him as a street kid, forever running away from his grandmom and "staying anywhere he could.
When I got to meet him I wanted to do over his tune 'Love Is A Message'.
So what we do was use some of the words from 'Love Is A Message' and make a new track."

Pablo took the youth to Dynamic Sounds studio in 1974 and the resulting remake far outshone its original incarnation.
"Love Is A Message" had become "Keep On Knocking", a sound that defines its era as strongly as any other reggae record. Using Pablo's "Black Gun" rhythm, although Pablo's own melodica version didn't see release until long after "Keep On Knocking" was a hit, it was an astonishing single.
This was a definitive roots music, the essence of mid-'70s reggae.
Miller was still plainly a youth singer, but no longer a kid.
His confidence had grown immeasurably.
Long afternoons spent rehearsing at Pablo's house had paid off by the bucketload.
Singer and producer hadn't hit paydirt as such, but they'd cracked the strongroom of the artistic bank and claimed riches for themselves.

With mixes and voicing courtesy of King Tubby ("the only person promoting Pablo music at that time," says Pablo today) and rhythms cut at Randy's and Dynamic studios, Miller and mentor cut six impeccable and impenetrably deep singles for the Rockers label in the space of 18 months.
They're all here, punctuated by their fearsome dub versions.

Laid end to end, what an impact they make.
"False Rasta", with its dub introduced by King Tubby's spoken cue.
The other-worldly "Baby I Love You So," in which Miller takes a love song far beyond normal mortal limits, and in which Pablo and Tubby excel on a superior (and in this case, very rare: this is a different mix) "King Tubby Meet Rockers Uptown" version.
There's the stately "Who Say Jah No Dread" a.k.a. "Too Much Commercialisation Of Rastafari", in which Miller's fullblown adult singing style was first revealed.
"Each One Teach One" gave a rasta dictum a musical voice at last.
The deceptively simple "Girl Name Pat", a more sophisticated record than a cursory listen makes apparent, closes the session.
Behind Miller, Pablo's melodica and xylophone lines, powering drum, bass and packed-tight horn arrangements make every note count.

"I put my heart into it," says Pablo of the sessions, "and the artist (Miller) put his heart Into it also. I could have cut ten LPs with Jacob. Every minute he wanted to go into the studio with me. But I wasn't looking to make money and exploit. I'm a producer, not a reducer. I really look for the talent in Jacob and try and help him."
Pablo also tried to "cool him, he used to get into a lot of trouble. That's just 'cause he was a kid, 14 or 15. He wasn't so big then as he was later, I used to get him to eat fruits instead of a lot of meat. But he was still big enough for people to think he was older than he was."

Pablo seems to regard his protege's departure from the Rockers stable as inevitable: "I didn't really have a lot of money. On most of these songs the musicians used to play for me for free because I was a musician too and I'd play for free on their sessions. I didn't have the money to make a lot of records with Jacob, and that was what he wanted."

Hungry for recognition, and it must be said, stardom, Miller was, inevitably, tempted away by promises of riches and fame by other producers, and eventually found them, to an extent at least, with Inner Circle.

Once the door finally swung open Miller swaggered through it as if nothing had ever held him back. "They kinda carry him into a faster world," says Pablo, ruefully. "I don't want to go on about it, but they tripped him out. I was really happy for him, but things went a bit too fast."
There was no bad blood between him and Pablo after Miller left.
In fact Pablo, and guitarist Earl 'China' Smith and drummer Lloyd 'Tinleg' Adams, members of the band on Miller's Rockers recordings, all joined Inner Circles temporarily when the band went through one of its regular splits.

No matter what heights Miller may have reached in later years, the tracks he cut with Augustus Pablo retain an aura all their own, as irrepressible as the singer himself.
"If he was still with us today he would have been a big, big singer," says Pablo with a fleeting smile at a happy reminiscence. "He had that kind of personality. Even if he was sad, you can't know it."

Jacob Miller may be sadly gone, joined a decade later by King Tubby, the studio wizard who shaped the sound to suit his youthful voice.
Augustus Pablo has long moved into other, equally rewarding musical territories.
But just for the space of one album, we have the perfect union of all three: "Who Say Jah Dread No" returns us to an era when Rockers was the ruler and Jacob Miller was in his ascendancy. Maybe once again the dancehalls will shake to "Who Say Jah No Dread".

:: IAN McCANN 1992

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