Toots and the Maytals ‘Do the Reggay’
The living king of reggae comes to Saint Rocke
Toots and the Maytals appear at Saint Rocke Saturday night. Photo by Lee Abel
Toots Hibbert picks up the phone singing.
He’s cruising through the mountains of Colorado on a never-ending tour that began in the small country town of May Pen, Jamaica, almost 50 years ago, and he’s doing what he does as beautifully as anybody on this planet: raising his voice in funky, funky song.
Hibbert belongs in the pantheon of great gospel and soul singers that includes Otis Redding, Mahalia Jackson, and Ray Charles. He is also the man who, quite literally, invented reggae.
That is, Hibbert gave name to the music that he and friends Bob Marley and Jimmy Cliff created in Jamaica in the 1960s. As Toots tells it, he was singing one day and the word just popped out. He actually meant to say the word “streggay” – which meant a girl who dresses raggedly – but it came out wrong. He then wrote the song “Do the Reggay” that not only became a number one hit but gave name to the new music.
“The music was playing in Jamaica for a long time and nobody knew what to call it,” Hibbert said. “I slip and say, ‘Do the Reggay’…and I record it. So I was the one who put the ‘R’ in the music. I am the inventor of the name reggae.”
Hibbert had known from the time he was a small child that he was a singer. He would attend Baptist church with his parents and when he sang, people’s heads would turn. And so as he tuned into the radio stations at night, his ears were attuned to the greats.
“I grew up listening to Jamaican artists like Jimmy Cliff and Owen Gray, but I also listened to American singers like Ray Charles, Wilson Picket, Elvis Presley, and a lot of Country & Western singers,” Hibbert said. “I also listened to Mahalia Jackson and Otis Redding and James Brown. I listened to a whole lot of great people.”
As a teenager, he made his way to the capitol, Kingston, to live with an older brother. He attended barber school, but during every spare moment, he sang. The music always poured out of him. All around Kingston, harmony groups were forming, and one day two other young men – Raleigh Gordon and Jerry Matthias – heard this barber singing to himself on the streets of the “Trenchtown” neighborhood of Kingston. They were transfixed.
“I loved to trim hair, and I had my little guitar with me,” Hibbert said. “When the barber teach me how to cut hair and I didn’t have any hair to cut, I play my little guitar, and that is how I met Raleigh Gordon and Jerry McCarthy and we become friends and we formed the group. I teach them what to do in music, in harmony, and we started our career.”
Thus Toots and the Maytals were formed. Much as he later invented the word reggae, he coined the name Maytals to imprint his musical vision upon the world.
“It meant happiness, real love, and make sure everybody know my name – there is a lot of number ones after my name, Maytals” Hibbert said. “And it’s a name of abilities: you can look for good music whenever you heard my name, Maytals. It’s the name. It’s original.”
Nobody in the history of Jamaican music, in fact, scored more number one hits – Toots and the Maytals topped the charts 31 times. But the quick success this country boy achieved also engendered some jealousy, according to Hibbert, that lead to his incarceration in 1967 just as he was about to tour the United Kingdom for the first time. Hibbert said marijuana was planted on him by rivals who wanted to stop his quick ascent. He spent 18 months in jail.
“They held me back and send a different artist in my stead to Europe,” he said. “It was politics. Nothing to talk about… They make me mad, so what the Lord helped me do – because I grew up in the church – was write this song.”
That song was “46-54 (That’s My Number)” and it referred to his prison number. As he always had, Hibbert responded to life with a song, and once again he scored a number one hit.
“I came out and have this number one record again,” he said. “So you know, they can’t stop me, man.”
What followed were some of the most remarkable recordings ever committed to vinyl (or CD or bits) in any genre at any time. If you were going to put one song in a space capsule with the intention of ensuring that whoever one day might listen would understand the human capacity for joy – and comprehend the indefinable notion that is funk – then Toots and the Maytals “Funky Kingston” would be the song that should go intergalactic. A string of records and hits in the early 1970s not only permanently established Toots in the musical firmament but helped define reggae music – “Pressure Drop” and “Time Tough” and his astonishing covers of “Take Me Home Country Roads” and “Louie Louie” are songs for the ages.
The rest of the Maytals are gone now, but Hibbert has never stopped. He is one of the most underappreciated of living musical legends. It’s long been one of the music industry’s greatest puzzles: he is an artist equal to contemporaries such as Marley, but who has rarely been recognized as such. He has wondered aloud himself about this, and suggested two explanations: he never grew his hair into dreads, and he didn’t die.
No matter. Those who know, know. A few years ago, the music industry rallied around him. Artists Willie Nelson, No Doubt, Bootsy Collins, Ben Harper, Eric Clapton, Keith Richards, Bonnie Raitt, and the Roots appeared on True Love and Hibbert was finally recognized with a Grammy Award.
But for Hibbert, it’s simple. He wakes up in the morning to sing. As he told reggae historian Hank Holmes a few years ago, “I am not a man who you’re going to hear about today and not hear about tomorrow. I’m a constant man. Do what I do. I live.”
Toots and the Maytals appear at Saint Rocke Saturday night. See saintrocke.com for ticket info and tootsandthemaytals.com for more information on Toots. ER