TY - JOUR
AU1 - Jason, McGraw,
AB - Abstract Between the 1940s and 1970s, various genres of Jamaican music, from big band jazz and tropical sounds, to ska/blue beat, to reggae, provided a sonic dimension to the mass migration of Caribbean people to Britain. Alongside the quest for housing and work, Caribbean people, as well as native black British and other diasporic black populations, built leisure spaces, community life, and a new consumption-driven domesticity centered around music and dancing. Yet ideologies of race, gender, and sexuality inflected the production and consumption of dance music in deleterious ways. White hostility to black settlement and interracial sex, part of the rampant racial discrimination known as the color bar, constrained the possibilities for Jamaican music. In response, Caribbean people’s pursuit of public dancing and music-filled leisure in dance halls, town halls, and semiprivate house parties became an early test for racial integration in the UK. As Caribbean settlers embraced Jamaican music in postwar Britain, they also shaped the music industry back in Jamaica. While noting the importance of musicians and other cultural producers, the focus here is on the audiences who created the music culture, as well as their own experience of migration and settlement through music and dance. Claudia Jones was defiant after a night spent in London’s Notting Hill police station. During a traffic stop in February 1962, officers had dragged Jones’s friend from his van and into a waiting police car, and she had followed them to the station, refusing to leave until his release. Yet for Jones, what turned out to be the wrongful arrest of her friend, a fellow West Indian immigrant, had not been her first encounter with the Metropolitan Police that night. Hours earlier, the communist, anticolonial, feminist organizer had attended a party in South London for the opening of Red Stripe House, the Jamaican beer company’s new British outpost. The Red Stripe function, part of the company’s effort to tap the growing overseas Jamaican consumer market, had been interrupted by “a policeman’s knock”—which, Jones explained, “anticipated a complaint about noise.” Partygoers had been adamant that they were within their rights and brushed off the noise complaint, likely made by a white neighbor in response to music and dancing. “It had been a gay party with lots of people present—not unusually noise [sic].” Even as Jones used the night’s confrontations with police to make a new appeal for “Afro-Asian-Caribbean” solidarity in Britain, she remained mordant about the growing West Indian house party scene. “Strange how most parties where coloured brethren gather bring reports about ‘coloured’ noise,” she mused.1 Many black readers of Jones’s account of police harassment and racial profiling, published on the front page of the London-based West Indian Gazette newspaper she edited, would have been familiar with the kinds of events she described. By the early 1960s, dance-filled parties featuring live or recorded music were the mainstay of an overseas Caribbean immigrant leisure world. On the night of the Red Stripe House party, there were scores of similar fêtes in town halls, clubs, and homes throughout Britain. Once newly arrived or settled people from British colonies and Commonwealth countries secured lodging and work, they soon turned to music and dancing as major pastimes. These latter pursuits have not received the same attention as have housing and employment in accounts of the postwar mass migration to Britain, but they were just as fundamental to the settlement of black people there.2 For tens of thousands of settlers, mostly from the Caribbean and within that population mostly from Jamaica, leisure was not a given but instead was part of a larger struggle. The British color bar, the name for the pervasive racial discrimination and hostility whites directed at native and foreign-born black people, cut across all aspects of social life. As Claudia Jones and her contemporaries recognized, the struggle against racism influenced Caribbean entertainment as much as it shaped employment and residential patterns. Just as people of color demanded fair access to labor and housing, they also challenged restrictions on public and private diversions. Indeed, some of the earliest and most contentious efforts to achieve racial integration in postwar Britain took place in dance halls, social clubs, and similar entertainment centers. Within the important realm of leisure, Jamaican music played an indispensable role in shaping black British social life in the decades after World War II. The sounds of Jamaica were first heard live and performed by artists who arrived in Britain between the 1940s and the 1960s as part of the same mass Caribbean immigration that brought the music’s audiences to the UK. Over time Caribbean settlers began to consume recordings from Jamaica and by Jamaicans recording in Britain, which were reproduced in public by disc jockeys on massive sound systems or in private homes on radiograms and phonographs. Changes in Jamaican music genres both mirrored and defined turning points in black British life, reflected in the sections below: the live swing, tropical sounds, and dance band music of the settlements of the 1940s–1950s; the emergence of blue beat / ska music at the height of Caribbean immigration in the early 1960s; and the rise of reggae as the British-born black second generation came of age around 1970. Tracing developments in Jamaican music in postwar Britain also means recognizing its relationship to other genres, in particular those originating in the United States and other parts of the Caribbean, which were as eagerly consumed by audiences. By the same token, Jamaicans were not always so separate from non-Jamaican fans of the music, whether white or black, who also cultivated the popular sounds.3 Still, over the postwar decades, Jamaican entertainers, music consumers, and dancers became a more identifiable part of the British scene as they separated themselves from an earlier pan-West Indian popular culture they had once helped create. This focus on how Jamaicans and their music became increasingly distinctive after the 1940s places renewed emphasis on family life, leisure, and consumerism in British immigrant history. The Jamaicanization of black British popular culture that rose in a crescendo around 1970, moreover, resounded far beyond Britain. To understand the global spread of reggae during the 1970s and beyond, which granted Jamaica the unofficial title of “loudest island in the world,” we must recognize the growing presence of the Jamaican diaspora, in particular those who settled in Britain, in that process.4 A social history of Jamaican music, using primary sources to emphasize its political and cultural contexts, demonstrates how essential the sound was to the mass migration that remade postwar Britain into a multiracial society. Among other virtues, this approach recognizes the audiences that listened and danced to that music. These audiences tend to be missing from histories of Jamaican music, one of the world’s most written-about art forms, which are driven by interviews with its leading entertainers and narrated in a celebratory tone.5 Because music performed by Jamaicans was fundamentally dance music, it required physical space as well as people who imposed their own meanings on that music. The physical sites of live and recorded music—the dance halls, town halls, basement clubs, and private homes—also became principal locations for the reproduction of racial, gender, and sexual ideologies in postwar Britain. The ideas of race and sex that instantiated dance scenes, moreover, prompted new state policies, often to the detriment of the music and its audiences. The racialization (and sexualization) of postwar British black populations took place not only through restrictive immigration laws, as important as they were, but also through routine, legal-rational, or “quiet” policing of social practices and public or quasi-public space. Contextualizing Jamaican music in postwar Britain as an audience-centered art form, then, offers new ways to think about immigrants’ experiences and their creation of social life in the face of changing and often repressive legal regimes.6 Big Band Music, Dance Halls, and the Color Bar By the era of World War II, a small network of jazz and dance clubs in British cities catered to migrants from the Caribbean and other British colonies. London’s Soho district hosted the Frivolity Club, Café Bleu, Hi-Ho Club, and the Palm Beach, which served as haunts for many Jamaican and West African men. In port cities like Liverpool, Bristol, and Cardiff with older West African or West Indian communities, cafés and social clubs hosted Caribbean newcomers. Dance music was the major draw at any locale. According to one fly-on-the-wall Mass Observation correspondent at Soho’s Hi-Ho Club, “The dancing was crude and most of the [white] girls did not know how to follow their partners especially if they were negroes.”7 Sociologist St. Clair Drake described a similar scene in Cardiff’s main music venue for people of color. At the Bute Town Social Club, the first-story bar gave way to a dance floor upstairs, where “[m]usic was provided by a piano and phonograph alternately,” and “the floor was very crowded. Three-fourths of the women were colored girls in their teens and early twenties. There was a sprinkling of older colored and white women. About a third of the crowd seemed to be British-born Coloured young men. The others were West Indian, West African and Arab transient seamen. . . . The group was lively but orderly, and quite a bit of jitterbugging was going on.” As entertainment, music and dancing came cheap; entry into a dance hall cost about the same as a movie ticket.8 On the production side of music, the cumulative effects of migration and changing personnel opened British bandstands to several Jamaicans by the late 1940s. Individual artists arrived as part of a new wave of postwar mass Caribbean immigration, beginning with World War II veterans who returned to Britain in search of work. Of the 492 passengers who left Jamaica for Britain aboard the Empire Windrush in June 1948, seven listed “musician” as their profession. Among the newcomers who found steady work in early postwar Britain were bassist Coleridge Goode, saxophonist Andy Hamilton, trumpeters Keith Edwards and Eddie “Tan Tan” Thornton, and singers Noel Brown and Rudolph Comacho. More enduring fame came to pianist Chester Harriott, the “Black Liberace,” and his partner, fellow Jamaican Vic Evans, who for decades were in demand on stage, radio, and television. Others joined them on later voyages to make up a few of the approximately 200,000 West Indians (of whom more than half were Jamaican) who entered Britain between 1948 and 1962. Artists who pursued careers after migrating followed earlier trails cleared by individuals like trumpeters Leslie “Jiver” Hutchinson and Leslie Thompson, two leading lights of the 1930s Kingston music scene still active in British big bands and jazz groups after the war. Along with fellow musical émigrés from other parts of the Caribbean and from various African colonies, Jamaican performers both deepened and diversified British jazz and dance sounds.9 Yet if British audiences heard the sounds of Jamaica it was by happenstance. Instead, dance band repertoires of the 1940s–50s reflected their members’ varied backgrounds, with “island songs” sandwiched between Cuban mambo and more dominant American jazz and swing styles. Musicians entered the British scene from Kingston, but few bands were Jamaican only. There were too few Jamaican artists to influence set lists, had they even wanted to, and their physical presence did not lead white bandleaders to adopt original Jamaican songs. Many remained active in the British music industry for decades often without being recognized as Jamaicans or making music identified with Jamaica. The status of West Indian artists as a numerical minority in the British big bands at midcentury reflected the makeup of their audiences, since their fellow islanders composed majorities in few if any dance halls. The ecumenical nature of the British scene, moreover, may in fact have reflected the big bands of the Caribbean, given the typical practice there of flooding dance floors with swing music, mambo, and boogie, sometimes sprinkled with local calypso or mento numbers. This was especially true in Jamaica’s growing tourist industry where most dance bands catered to the foreign trade. By midcentury, moreover, these global genres formed part of a musical lingua franca accessible to performers from many countries. Black expatriate audiences in the early postwar years adopted as their own a similar range of musical styles and dances, regardless of their provenance. The polyglot sounds of the British bands with West Indian musicians likely produced a sense of familiarity for homesick migrants.10 The relatively inclusive nature of the bandstands did not extend to the dance floors, however, where men of color, the overwhelming numerical majority of early migrants, routinely faced racial discrimination. Even as some black entertainers found receptive audiences from the 1940s onward, few white-controlled venues welcomed people of African or Asian descent as audience members. As Paul Gilroy has argued, black artists in Britain had long been embraced as cultural producers but not as consumers in white entertainment spaces.11 Serious conflict over racial discrimination in British dance halls first gained notoriety during the war, when local entertainment organizers and hospitality groups tried to balance the leisure needs of military personnel with local populations keen to remove young people, especially young white women, from unsupervised social milieus. White Britons often attributed racial tensions to white U.S. Southerners who opposed the presence of black men in dance halls, led boycotts, and on occasion violently expelled West Indian men from public dances. To be sure, dance halls in the Liverpool area and in London were conflict zones for white American and black British and colonial subjects.12 Yet these conflicts, which persisted in the postwar demobilization, exposed the white British role in exclusionary practices. Such was the case in early February 1946, when a fight broke out between razor blade- and lead pipe-wielding white British and black Jamaican airmen at the Blackbush airfield in Surrey. According to the Daily Mail, “The fight followed dance hall disputes over WAAFs and local [white] girls and allegations of repeated indiscipline on the part of the Jamaicans.” Fearing further disturbances, the Royal Air Force removed only the Jamaican men from the base.13 Violence around public music and dancing laid bare the ingrained white hostility and discriminatory practices known as the color bar. Although not backed by the power of law, the pervasive racialized exclusion and impoverishment visited upon nonwhite Britons reached systemic proportions. “Almost the entire population in Britain really expect the coloured man to live in an inferior area . . . devoted to coloured people,” commented Trinidadian cricketer Learie Constantine, who experienced the color bar first-hand. “Most British people would be quite unwilling for a black man to enter their homes, nor would they wish to work with one as a colleague, nor stand shoulder to shoulder with one at a factory bench.”14 White anthropologist Kenneth Little dispelled the common British myth that white antagonism was a direct, and to some, innocent response to the mass influx of colonized black subjects. In the 1930s, a period of scant immigration to Britain, Little’s national survey found that 60 percent of commercial establishments admitted to refusing service to people of color.15 Behind the myth that the sudden arrival of people of color caused British racism lay tangled notions of sex as well as race. Regulating sexuality and gender roles by keeping black men away from white women preoccupied white officials, parents, and consequently, entertainment venues. Jamaican saxophonist Andy Hamilton, a mainstay of the postwar Birmingham jazz scene, married a local white woman and openly advocated interracial marriages. He paid for his public stance on the issue when white men assaulted him on stage one night while he performed, knocking his teeth out in the attack. Yet contempt flowed in many directions where anxieties of race and sex mingled: one white male commentator blamed any transgression of the color bar not on black men but on “sluttish English girls.”16 Dance halls stood out as major sites of these sexualized violations of the color bar. Until the late 1950s, men composed roughly two-thirds of the West Indian immigrant population, and “because the majority of coloured men were ostracized from ordinary white society,” the Times of London reported, “their only opportunity of mixing with white people was at cheap dance halls.” In response, anxious West Indian community leaders lambasted as “‘irresponsible’ people who organize functions at which coloured men are able to meet and associate freely with young and immature white girls.” The association of the dance halls with interracial sex permeated postwar popular culture, from the novels of West Indian immigrant authors to the many race relations-themed teleplays broadcast on the BBC. When dancing facilitated the joining together of white (women) and black (men) in these fictional narratives, the music was typically jazz-infused and often Caribbean in origin.17 White opposition and violence against race-mixing encouraged many dance halls to put in place a generalized ban on people of color. Venues in Cardiff, other than a few multiracial spots in Butetown noted by St. Clair Drake, instituted a blanket exclusion in 1955, and soon towns across Wales followed suit. The excuses for such a ban were many. A dance hall manager in Trealaw who admitted that people of color were “models of good conduct” nevertheless barred their entrance fearing what he called “racial gang strife.” Locals cheered the ban in the Welsh town of Llwynpia “chiefly because white girls chased coloured boys, and this caused trouble with the white boys,” according to a press summary. “They thought the white girls were as much to blame as the coloureds.” Dancehall owners and townsfolk apologized for the policy and admitted that young white men were responsible for the violence, yet they chose the same approach as the RAF in 1946 of banning the presence of people of color in order to prevent the racist reactions of whites.18 Racial exclusion in Wales proved to be only the most dramatic example of pervasive discrimination in music and dance venues across Britain. Like housing and employment markets, where qualified applicants faced rejections with ample apologies, entertainment centers felt compelled to justify their color-bar positions. Lack of a legal rationale for banning entire groups necessitated such excuse-making. In 1956, a dance hall in Preston, Lancashire, denied entry to a young Nigerian man, stating vaguely that “a group of coloured people had made trouble there some months before.” A new dance hall in Wolverhampton promised to hang a sign at its opening reading “No coloured dancers or Teddy boys,” with its owner parroting the same reasons stated by Preston’s venue.19 Other establishments were more forthright in defending exclusions. When the Locarno ballroom in Sheffield put in place a “limited colour bar” in 1958, the manager stated “that trouble was unwittingly caused when a large number of coloured men asked [white] girls, who had come with white men, to dance.” Violent conflict was a real concern after a white man threatened to form a Ku Klux Klan terrorist group “to persuade (by force if necessary) the blacks that they are not good enough to go out with white people.” In response to this news, one Jamaican welder promised that, although the immigrant population was law-abiding, “retaliation would follow any attempt [by whites] to cause trouble.”20 West Indians and their allies readily challenged the color bar and racialized violence in entertainment. When the Trealaw hall management announced the ban on entry for people of color, dancers booed and “girls shouted ‘We don’t agree.’” And in one of the earliest grassroots efforts to overturn British racial discrimination, West Indians and Somalis organized petitions, mobilized support from the local Communist Party, and threatened to sue the Welsh dance halls. The Trealaw management conceded to the protest and lifted the ban, with the caveat that “coloured people should set up their own committee to be responsible for their behaviour.” Given the consensus that young white men caused the violence, the behavior in question was undoubtedly black men’s mixing with white women.21 Immigrants elsewhere in Britain soon engaged in activism of their own. After receiving complaints that London dance halls turned away black men, the Jamaican leaders of the Anglo Caribbean Association carried out investigations and then reported to city officials, hoping the publicity would pressure local establishments to change their policies. A dance venue in Ilford, East London, restricted entry in 1959 but backed down after Nigerian students and the local synagogue protested. Jamaicans in Wolverhampton led similarly successful efforts to reverse discriminatory policies at local establishments. Black immigrants may have found it easier to organize against the dance hall bans than in the arenas of housing or employment. Both black lodgers, who were dispersed throughout cities, and newcomers, who sought work with a variety of firms, faced difficulties in forging unified resistance to the endemic discrimination practiced by landlords and employers. In contrast, the dance halls, as community focal points that already drew regular black and white crowds to their doors, appeared as readymade places for public protest. Due to this visibility, some of the earliest black British civic organizing was around the right to dance.22 Immigrant groups attempted to sway public opinion because there were no written legal measures to counteract the color bar. The same laissez-faire attitudes that Parliament invoked to block immigration restrictions after the war also scuttled passage of antidiscrimination legislation. Opposition to legal action began early in the era of mass migration, when MPs defeated a sweeping 1950 bill designed to abolish the color bar at boarding houses, restaurants, cafes, hotels, theatres, music halls, and dance halls. The bill’s sponsor, MP Fenner Brockway, introduced the measure five more times over the following decade, meeting with the same negative result at each hearing. Advocacy for the legislation by The Haldane Society lawyers guild did little to move the discussion forward. Without legal protections, people of color relied on public pressure to open dance halls and, when necessary, physical resistance against white vigilantism.23 Many musicians joined the struggle for racial integration. The British Musicians’ Union boycotted venues that banned black people, which led to tense relations between the union and the Scala Ballroom in Wolverhampton, a city with a sizable Jamaican population. In the late 1950s, the union expelled three bandleaders for continuing to play the Scala, causing the ballroom’s owner to threaten hiring nonunion musicians. Some white musicians spoke up personally against the color bar as well. Johnny Dankworth, the country’s foremost white jazz bandleader, often performed with an integrated (if mainly white) backing group and supported antiracist causes. A 1959 Daily Worker profile noted that Dankworth’s actions reflected “his staunch belief that music knows no racial hatred and no colour bar, and that society should do well to emulate it.”24 Civil rights activists recognized that the prominence of black musicians in racially integrated acts encouraged other cultural workers to voice demands for change. “One of the consequences of the very heavy representation of coloured people in the top ranks of popular entertainers,” commented one Haldane Society lawyer, “is that the popular entertainers come out en masse in a very strong way against manifestations of racial prejudice.” Performers in the humbler ranks of the music industry did their part for the movement, like the West Indian quintet in Sheffield that played calypsos “to encourage better relations between the whites and coloured” in that city.25 Still, the solidarity of musicians could not overcome changing musical tastes, which may have exacerbated the color bar in entertainment. Big bands largely disappeared during the 1950s, propelled by the youth-driven demand for rhythm and blues and rock ’n’ roll. As teenagers adopted the new American music, dance halls dropped the more expensive big bands from their live shows. The concurrent repeal of the twenty-year ban on concert tours by US musicians also cut into the monopoly once enjoyed by the integrated British big bands. Except for a few notable interracial American jazz groups, most tours from the States featured either all-white or all-black acts, many of which found enthusiastic if predominantly white audiences in Britain.26 Other changes in the consumption of music may have affected black-white interaction in the dance halls. Even as live music continued to thrive, listening audiences displaced social dancing in many venues, a trend that reduced the opportunities for people of color and whites to interact. The decline of swing and other social dance music genres may have hastened a decline in live gigs that drew potentially mixed-race crowds. Faced with these aesthetic and demographic changes in the live music scene, many Jamaican and other Caribbean performers who previously had worked on racially diverse bandstands embraced new opportunities in smaller jazz clubs or on radio and television or simply moved abroad. In each case their transition to other venues led to less direct contact with immigrant or native black audiences. Those artists who gained acceptance in the mass culture—and the BBC did hire many Caribbean musicians in the 1950s and 60s—appealed to a national viewership or listening audience that may not have known much about their respective backgrounds. The changing musical styles of the dance halls likely diminished the possibilities for black-white social interaction in leisure settings, fraught though it had been with conflict and incipient violence.27 West Indian Community Organizing, Town Hall Dances, and Blue Beat Music Music and dance, more than just pleasure pursuits, served as a tool to combat racism and build solidarity. In the mid-1950s, enterprising West Indians in Birmingham approached the Church of England Temperance Society to request use of its buildings “for dances, concerts, meetings and the practice of their handicrafts,” to which the city’s archdeacon responded positively. Similar efforts were under way at the time in the West Midlands, where single black men lacked leisure outlets. “This lack of balance makes it difficult to provide any real social life for coloured people,” wrote the Times, “although regular West Indian dances in the West Bromwich community centre are said to be well attended.”28 The demand for leisure spaces under the temporary control of the immigrant community became acute after the antiblack hysteria and mass violence of August 1958 in the city of Nottingham and in London’s Notting Hill neighborhood.29 Just five months after the violence, euphemistically known as race riots, Claudia Jones and the West Indian Gazette organized a winter carnival at St. Pancras Town Hall in London. The carnival was pan-Caribbean in its outlook, although it hewed closely to its Trinidadian origins by hiring calypsonians and steel bands as headliners. The event, televised by the BBC, grew steadily over the years, and by 1962 it sold out London’s Seymour Hall with over thirteen hundred attendees coming to watch beauty pageants, limbo dancers, steel bands, and calypso sets. For Jones and other West Indian cultural activists, carnival meant forging relations among diverse black peoples in Britain while showing whites the positive cultural contributions of the Caribbean.30 The new cultural organizing was a direct response to the antiblack violence of 1958; it also echoed older antiracist efforts dating back to the dance clubs, cafes, and hostels founded during the war. At Cardiff’s Bute Town Social and Welfare Club, St. Clair Drake had observed, “Leaders interpret dancing and musical skills as advancing status of colored people, and [dance and music] programs as improving race relations.”31 The carnival, held annually until Claudia Jones’s death in 1964, inspired other organizations to stage their own fêtes throughout the year. The Clapham Inter-Racial Club in Southeast London hosted a dance attended by four hundred people at Wandsworth Town Hall in June 1960, which was broadcast over the BBC Caribbean Service the same evening. The West Indian Standing Conference (WISC), an umbrella civic organization with integrationist goals, arranged a dance at Lambeth Town Hall on West Indian Federation Day.32 The West Indian Student Union held an annual Christmas dance in London, and the Afro-Caribbean Society staged beauty contests, magic shows, and grand dances.33 The Caribbean Labour Congress, Caribbean Sports Club, and Nigerian Student Union took turns renting out Holborn Hall, Conway Hall, Hornsey Town Hall, or St. Pancras Town Hall, the last being a favorite venue for many West Indian groups for its proximity to several immigrant enclaves.34 Similar dances and concerts took place at town halls in Birmingham, Nottingham, Manchester, Leeds, and even smaller cities throughout the late 1950s and the 1960s. The town hall dances became a West Indian institution, allowing organizations to raise funds and awareness of their services while providing much needed entertainment and social outlets to the community. They also enabled immigrants to claim public spaces temporarily as part of an effort to raise their visibility and push back against white hostility. The latter function proved all the more vital after many white-owned dance halls redoubled their color bar restrictions in the wake of the antiblack riots of August 1958. At the same time, leisure remained front and center in the town hall dances. “What our people are craving,” opined the West Indian Gazette, “is entertainment at reasonable cost.”35 The town hall dances were pan-Caribbean affairs, even as Jamaicans, predominant in the West Indian population, increasingly made their influence felt. In the nationwide Tropical Fiesta and Dance Contest of 1963, sponsored by the Clapham Inter-Racial Club and other Caribbean immigrant groups, Jamaican dance couples won the cha-cha and calypso dance competitions in most cities.36 Community organizers recruited black musical acts – many Jamaican in origin – for the town hall dances. The dances provided a new source of revenue for expatriate jazz groups, mento artists, and calypsonians, with bands that could play a range of styles in high demand. For its fourth anniversary dance, held alongside the continuing patronage of the winter carnival, the West Indian Gazette hired the London-based Jamaican group Ivan Chin and His West Indian Band, known for its mento and calypso numbers but just as adept at jazz and West African highlife.37 In the early 1960s, a new sound known as blue beat won over British Caribbean dancers, and community organizers began to hire specialists in the music to play the town hall events. Blue beat, a Jamaican genre derived from US rhythm and blues, was the island’s commercial popular music after 1959. Yet the name “blue beat” came not from Jamaica but from a London-based record label of the same name, an imprint of Melodisc that released much of the music onto the British market. Even after the Jamaican sound gained an indigenous name of its own, ska, the British continued to call it blue beat, much to the bemusement of Jamaicans. Name confusion aside, the dance and music converged in the 1964 blue beat craze, which was propelled largely by a single song, Millie Small’s “My Boy Lollipop,” a worldwide hit record that year.38 Along with the global fad for blue beat / ska, a new cohort of Jamaican performers arrived in Britain ready to play in the style. Ezz Reco and the Launchers with fellow Jamaican Boysie Grant were the first blue beat group to make the British music charts with “King of Kings,” just weeks before the release of “My Boy Lollipop,” in February 1964. Whereas Ezz Reco had lived in Britain for some years, other musicians came as part of the last cohort of Jamaican mass immigration between 1959–1964: Small, singers Pat Rhoden and Jackie Edwards, trombonist Rico Rodriguez, guitarist Ernest Ranglin (musical arranger for Millie Small and for Chris Blackwell’s Island Records in London), and ska groups The Jamaica J’s, the Jamaican Jubilee Stompers, Eric Clarke and the Debonaires, and Jimmy James and the Vagabonds. The changeover in personnel coincided with the decline of the big bands, a time when older Jamaican performers moved on to the international jazz scene, often in Europe, hunkered down in small London jazz clubs, or retired from professional music.39 Even as the new Jamaican sound pulled away from any aesthetic associations with an existing pan-West Indian music culture, some of its prominent expatriate artists nonetheless worked closely with Caribbean community-building efforts. The most prominent among them was blue beat bandleader Ezz Reco, a Jamaican native who, alongside his wife, antiracist activist Frances Ezzreco (as she often stylized her name), took a leading role in West Indian organizing in London. Amid an already hectic recording and live concert schedule, which included a national tour with Roy Orbison in 1964, the Ezzrecos formed the Coloured Peoples Progressive Association, held positions as founder-members of WISC, and worked with Claudia Jones to end housing discrimination, immigration restrictions, and racial disparities in arrests and incarceration rates.40 Other musicians found their way into the movement as well, as Jamaican blue beat music blended easily with calls for pan-West Indian solidarity. Tony Brown and His Band hired themselves out for parties, advertising “Cheap Rates to Associations affiliated the [West Indian] Standing Conference.”41 A joint Jamaican and Trinidadian Independence Day dance in Derby, the West Indian Gazette beamed, witnessed five hundred folks dancing “to the throbbing beat of the tropical calypso and Ska [which] would chill the heart of any infamous Klu Klux Klan member or for that matter of any race-hating fraternities.” WISC encouraged collaborations with artists and singled out music makers as central to the cause. “We in the Standing Conference look forward to the day,” wrote WISC leaders in a 1963 editorial, “when all West Indians—be they official[s], students, writers, actors, musicians, singers, dancers, painters, businessmen, landlords, skilled or unskilled workers, women or children, have joined in the search for a common bond, a common aim, and a common expression of unity.” Musicians also helped forge diasporic ties within nonsanctioned groups. When Rico Rodriguez toured the British Isles with his “Rasta combo” soon after settling in London from Kingston in 1962, he met fellow Rastafarian Jamaicans and became their unofficial spokesperson in the UK.42 Yet despite the musical and political fervor of the early 1960s, the constraints on community organizing through entertainment were substantial. Black impresarios’ dependence on white-run institutions ultimately limited their options for securing dance outlets or hearing Jamaican and other Caribbean music in public. White adherence to racialized social codes defined appropriate leisure behavior narrowly and at the same time held people of color to a standard of conduct different than whites, which continued to circumscribe black access to public entertainment spaces.43 Financial limitations meant that few immigrants owned and operated dance halls, pubs, or music venues that could in turn be used for the community’s benefit. Interracial clubs and parties sponsored by well-intentioned if paternalistic white churches and liberal groups, for their part, almost by definition created spaces devoid of black music of any kind.44 Yet in all likelihood it was indifference that, together with this systematic discrimination, presented the greatest barrier to hearing the music in white leisure spaces, other than during the brief blue beat craze of 1964. When the Illustrated London News asked, “Has no suburban dance hall thought of inviting the local West Indian band for an evening?” it received a brusque reply from the manager of one establishment. “‘Nobody’s interested in your British Commonwealth,’” he stated. “‘It’s a dead bore.’” The magazine claimed the manager’s contempt was the “prevalent attitude” across the country.45 Basement Clubs, Sound Systems, and Noisy Parties As West Indians fought for inclusion in the dance halls or attempted to create their own provisional public venues, many other newcomers found their way instead to leisure sites in semiprivate dwellings. The basement club or house bar with its improvised dance floor sprang up wherever black people owned or occupied homes, a phenomenon spearheaded by increasingly visible Jamaican immigrants. Donald Hinds, a journalist who arrived in London from Kingston in the 1950s and eventually found work with Claudia Jones, recalled the weekend house parties as “the universal form of immigrant entertainment.” Music, dancing, and alcohol were de rigueur at house parties, which could spill over into several rooms of a house or, as was common practice for many impresarios, be crammed into dank basements. Forced overcrowding in housing put a premium on space, and the basement bars and house parties provided vital outlets for socializing, if only in slightly less confined environs. “These parties were indeed noisy,” Hinds confessed, and “bodies touched in a slow grinding mento.”46 While in many cases the house parties and basement clubs may have fostered a pan-Caribbean camaraderie, the West Indian Gazette reported on a “clan system in operation” in Nottingham. In the new immigrant enclaves, “Sons and daughters of Jamaica gather together for parties,” while settlers from St. Kitts, Dominica, and other islands held their own respective get-togethers.47 Settlers hosted events as a means to economic gain, with the entrepreneurial intent clear to attendees. Those “more astute [members of the community] will attempt to exploit the lack of social facilities, by organising pay-parties,” noted a London social worker and early historian of the West Indian house party scene. “They will also go to great lengths in an attempt to provide an atmosphere for emotional release, through a varied selection of records; with food and drink to satisfy the physical needs of their customers.” Donald Hinds concurred, remarking that “By the end of the fifties, it no longer made economic sense to adequately provide [free] drinks for nearly a hundred people.”48 The pay parties were akin to the juke joints in the southern United States or rent parties in African American neighborhoods like Harlem and Chicago’s Bronzeville, institutions many Jamaicans had experienced firsthand during labor sojourns to the States during and after World War II. Basement clubs in Britain also shared a social and linguistic connection with shebeens, the unauthorized drinking establishments in contemporary Ireland and black South African townships. Yet the most obvious roots of the basement clubs stretched back to Jamaica itself, where yard parties served much the same ends as shebeens, juke joints, and rent parties elsewhere.49 The island-based and commercial nature of weekend parties revealed that they were not merely a defense against antiblack racism, although they were also that. In this latter role, they provided psychic and social resources against the treatment immigrants experienced in the search for work and housing, as well as in more formal social life. One index of the house parties as an immigrant response to the color bar was their concentration in London neighborhoods recently settled by West Indians. Whereas during the war Caribbean leisure and entertainment had been concentrated in the multiracial if predominantly white Soho nightlife district, by the late 1950s, ten years into mass Caribbean immigration, most black music and dancing had relocated to South London and Notting Hill / Ladbroke Grove, at the time two fast-growing black neighborhoods. Jah Vego, who settled in Ladbroke Grove and became a prominent figure in London’s Jamaican music scene in the 1950s, remembered the importance of the local house parties. “So come the weekend you have to relax, completely, among your own crowd and be able to carry on like you did back home. Not that there was much choice for us, because so many places in London wouldn’t let black men in,” Vego noted. “So we have to do our own thing, keeping dances in houses, in basements, in the shebeens, or in the school dinner halls.”50 Jamaican efforts to monetize house parties led in some cases to more institutionalized social clubs. The Anglo Caribbean Association under George Brown’s direction ran such a club in the London borough of Lewisham in part because he and his Jamaican compatriots were refused entry to dance halls. The club moved from site to site out of necessity as it operated on the fringes of the law, yet once it received a license from the London County Council, the association rented a permanent location. Licensing permitted not just right to sell alcohol but also legal recognition to a permanent establishment in the city. As part of their opening celebrations, the association held a dance at the new club building in June 1959.51 Many impresarios gave their drinking establishments names for a sheen of respectability or, at least, visibility. The Caribbean Club operated in Birmingham; Manchester’s Moss Side neighborhood hosted the Palm Beach Social Club; the industrial city of Huddersfield had the Arawak; and London at different times accommodated clubs like the Eldorado, the Hoola Hoop, and the Gigi. By 1960, according to the London Metropolitan Police, there were nineteen registered “coloured clubs” in Brixton, ten alone in a one-block radius around Railton Road and Coldharbour Lane.52 These outfits varied in their membership and aims, although Jamaican social clubs often differed from those run by expatriates from neighboring islands. According to historian Ron Ramdin, Trinidadian and Leeward Islander clubs in Manchester hosted political debates, public lectures, educational programs, and entertainment, even as the Jamaican organizations limited their activities to social dancing and music. The emergence of the Jamaican basement bar-cum-social club coincided with the larger expansion of postwar British nightlife. The hands-off policies of Parliament in the 1950s allowed any applicant who paid a fee to open an all-night café, and by the end of the decade, there were in total some 1,700 all-night establishments in London alone, many selling liquor under the table and falling into the shadow status of being a shebeen.53 Limited space encouraged hosts to rely on recorded music in their basement clubs. West Indians in London pioneered the use of recorded music for dancing even before large-scale immigration began in the late 1940s. In Soho’s Hi-Ho Club during the war, couples took to the floor while Jamaican men spun records like “Tiger Rag,” “Era-La-La,” and “When the Poppies Bloom” on the club’s radiogram.54 Increasingly compact and relatively affordable technology made dancing to recorded music possible. The radiogram, a furniture-sized combination radio and record player, became the centerpiece of the Caribbean party. Like the social mixing in the dance halls, the house parties and the records that inspired them featured prominently in early immigrant novels. In The Last Enchantment (1960), Jamaican author Neville Dawes placed his West Indian characters in cramped London flats, with the music “coming from a small noisy portable gramophone on the dining table,” which allowed them to recreate the social dancing they brought with them from home.55 As some basement parties evolved into commercial enterprises or social clubs with a more permanent address, many impresarios began to hire professional sound systems to spin their records. The sound system, a mobile public-address unit made up of two record players and microphones wired to giant homemade speakers, was a direct import from Jamaica, where operators had staged pay-at-the-door parties in yards and nightclubs since the 1940s. The first sound system operator in Britain was Vincent Forbes, better known by his deejay name Duke Vin, who built his sound system, The Tickler, after immigrating to London from Jamaica in the mid-1950s. Duke Vin’s first gig in Britain was for a Jamaican dance held at Brixton Town Hall. Vin was soon joined by a second sound system (or simply “sound”) run by Willbert Campbell, who went by Count Suckle, Forbes’s shipmate to Britain. Duke Vin and Count Suckle both settled in Ladbroke Grove and together carved up territory in the Jamaican music scene, playing at shebeens and town hall dances throughout the city. In many ways the sound systems, as mobile dance outfits, anticipated the discothèques that transformed urban dance cultures in Europe, the United States, and elsewhere in the 1960s. As a Jamaican invention, the sound system’s presence in Britain reinforced the increasing preponderance of Jamaican music and Jamaican people in the local black dance scene.56 British sound systems forged simultaneous transnational and multinational musical ties through their selection of recordings and their business operations. Duke Vin, Count Suckle, and other sounds in the early years provided dance music in the form of American rhythm and blues, which replicated the preferences of audiences in Jamaica. Donald Hinds recalled the earliest Jamaican sound systems in London playing Fats Domino, a particular favorite among Jamaicans at home and abroad. The British sound systems’ role in the town hall dances also linked them to musical developments in the wider British Caribbean music scene as they spun records between live sets by blue beat or calypso acts.57 The clear direction of the sounds’ cultural orientation, however, was towards a tighter connection with exclusively Jamaican content. Business dealings with the music industry in Kingston, for their part, not only ensured success of the early British sounds but also guaranteed the growth of a transnational Jamaican recording industry. By the time of his arrival in Britain, Duke Vin was an old hand in the dance scene, having worked as a record selector (setting the play list) and disc jockey (operating the turntables) for Tom the Great Sebastian, one of the early Jamaican sound systems, in Kingston. Later British sounds also had direct ties with Jamaica. In early 1960s Manchester and Nottingham, the Skylark sound system maintained business contacts with Coxson Dodd’s Studio One, the premier record label in Jamaica. Operators likely benefitted from these connections in multiple ways, by obtaining exclusive or cheap recordings from home or by being the first in Britain to receive the latest Jamaican music, giving them an advantage over commercial rivals. For record labels in Jamaica, personal or business relationships with the British sound systems may have offered a secondary market for an older stock of recorded music or advertising for upcoming releases in the UK. These musical interactions paralleled those of the wider settler community, which nurtured bonds with family and friends in the Caribbean through news, charitable work, and money remittances.58 Sound systems and house parties, notwithstanding any musical diversity, offered convenient platforms for the promotion of Jamaican music once it became commercially available in Britain. For the overseas community, the operators provided the most immediate, and in some cases only access to the latest styles from Jamaica. The lack of radio airplay for ska / blue beat (other than Millie Small’s “My Boy Lollipop,” a top ten hit in 1964) handed the sound systems an early monopoly in quasi-public performance of Jamaican records. The West Indian party culture and the sound systems they featured provided promotional opportunities to touring artists from Jamaica. The first such event took place in late 1960, when Melodisc hosted a party for its Blue Beat label artist Laurel Aitken, the top singer of Jamaican rhythm and blues, who arrived in London to record and tour.59 Other promoters turned to the same strategy for subsequent visitors. Having just arrived from Jamaica in August 1963 for the recording sessions of the song that would launch her into global pop stardom, Millie Small played a London house party with Jamaican songwriter Jackie Edwards and musician Tony Washington. “Against the background of Christopher Phipps’ Cleopatra-decorated flat,” gushed the West Indian Gazette, “the little spit-fire singer, 15-year-old Milly [sic] decided to entertain other artists under the Island Record contract. . . . The guests marvelled at the piano backing and empty beer-tin drums.”60 The blue beat craze of 1964, touched off by Ezz Reco’s and Millie Small’s hit songs, led to a boom in Jamaican music. As young white Britons momentarily embraced the style, the oldest London sound systems accepted regular and more lucrative work in Soho discothèques. The Flamingo’s All-Nighter and the Marquee Club on Wardour Street hired Duke Vin to spin ska and American soul records in between live music sets, while the Roaring Twenties, a hangout of young white British mods, recruited Count Suckle to do the same, before he opened his own business, the Q Club, in Paddington.61 With the established sound systems taking up permanent residence in nightclubs, newer operators plunged into the West Indian house and town hall dance parties. By the end of the decade, fresh outfits like Sir Coxson, Dan’s Ultra Sound System, Admiral Ken the Universal Sound, and The People’s Sound could be found throughout London’s black neighborhoods. To drum up business, impresarios advertised their services in Caribbean immigrant magazines and white-run borough newspapers, although word of mouth likely brought them most of their gigs.62 The proliferation of sound systems extended the reach of recorded Jamaican music in Britain, giving exposure to songs that otherwise would have received limited attention, in particular since the BBC denied regular airplay to ska and its successor, reggae, until the early 1970s. Although they never entirely supplanted local live acts, the sound systems guaranteed that Jamaican recordings were a commonplace aural accompaniment to black life in Britain. The mass white audience for blue beat, albeit brief, had encouraged the intensification of the mechanical reproduction of music within the Caribbean communities themselves. Jamaicans and other West Indians soon discovered that creating leisure enclaves or music that appealed to whites did not stop antiblack hostility. On the contrary, white neighbors frequently reported shebeens, basement bars, and clubs to the police. In part, this public assault on West Indian home entertainment fit into a larger panic over vice spurred by the proliferation of lightly regulated all-night cafés, which politicians and newspaper editors considered vehicles of crime, homosexuality, and prostitution.63 Yet as Claudia Jones had observed after the Red Stripe party, whites racialized noise in ways that made black party goers specific targets of condemnation. By the 1960s, white inhabitants and newspapers coined a phrase to disparage immigrant black entertainment: the noisy party. While London’s borough papers regularly carried lurid accounts of delinquency in the West Indian basement clubs, it was the national broadsheets and tabloids that harped on the noisy parties. The Telegraph reported on one tenant in Westminster who “had the courage to complain about the nuisance caused by rowdy parties,” with their “music, shouting, singing, screaming, and obscene language.” One News of the World headline blared, “Rid Us of These Party Pests Plead Families.”64 The Caribbean community magazine Flamingo criticized the white press for its coverage, pointing out that a black person appeared in pages of the latter “only when he is a problem; only when he is ‘popped’ with drugs; or running a noisy backstreet club.”65 White complaints of West Indian noise unwittingly exposed the fact that commercialized house parties grew out of the color bar in housing. The town clerk for Hackney explained to the London Council for Social Services in 1956 how racial discrimination forced immigrants into overcrowded conditions and toward purchases of substandard houses at inflated prices. To pay the costs of such housing, “the purchaser usually lets out all the rooms at very high rents to other coloured folk in an endeavour to reimburse himself for the cost of the premises as soon as possible.” Renters in turn sublet space “to help pay the high rent” or held rent parties, which led to “friction.” “One aspect of some coloured people’s behaviour that appears to cause annoyance and complaints from neighbouring white people,” the town clerk concluded, “is their habit of enjoying very noisy music and dancing.”66 An exchange of letters in the pages of the Guardian five years later proved that the social dynamic had changed little. After one letter writer criticized housing discrimination against black renters, a man from Balham responded that any discrimination was caused by the house parties with their “coloured people, beer, wines, and spirits. This leads to a general build up of noise until about 8 p.m., when a record player is brought into operation at full volume. At this stage our floors and windows begin to vibrate.” Another correspondent, similarly defending the color bar in housing, described Caribbean immigrants “shouting from windows and along the street, and the interminable and inescapable record players thundering out pop records from morning till night, and frequently far into the night,” which “do nothing at all to improve race relations.” For these white Londoners, black noise canceled out the validity of any protest against antiblack racism.67 Complaints by white neighbors and lurid tales in the press set off government crackdowns on West Indian parties. By the early 1960s, police departments across Britain engaged in regular intimidation of presumed revelers. Raids on what officers called “the typical West Indian party” were a common practice leading to mass arrests of attendees. And once police identified neighborhood shebeens, they often stationed patrolmen nearby to arrest black men merely for entering or exiting the establishments, regardless of their licensing status.68 In response, Jamaicans brought lawsuits against the police in Birmingham, Leeds, London, and Nottingham on a nearly weekly basis, with arrest for trumped-up charges and use of excessive force appearing as the most common complaints. Only occasionally did judges indict police officers, as in the case of a young constable fined for causing grievous bodily harm to a Jamaican man during the bust of a late-night West Indian party in Nottingham in 1962. State violence against the community was so widely recognized that Jamaica’s Prime Minister Alexander Bustamante, on a visit to London in September 1962, asked the home secretary to investigate charges of police brutality.69 Joseph Hunte, a WISC activist, described how the commercialization of the house parties propelled police surveillance and harassment in black neighborhoods. In the London borough of Lambeth, “West Indians in the area were organizing rowdy week-end parties, much to the disgust of their white neighbours. Complaints were centred around the loud playing of radiograms after 11.00 p.m., the slamming of car doors after late parties, and the shouting which went on after party-leavers came out of the house on their way home.” Hunte argued that noise alone did not provide sufficient pretext for a police crackdown, although alcohol did. “The police could have done nothing with respect to noises, than to warn the party-givers to try to moderate the volume of these radiograms so as no to disturb the neighbours.” Instead, “the police concentrated their attacks upon these persons by alleging that drinks were being sold on the premises. Two cases were brought to my notice where the police had used this tactic to stop week-end parties so as to satisfy the white neighbours. The matters went before the court and the police lost the cases.” West Indian Gazette journalist Donald Hinds was more succinct on the issue: “Drinks were sold and the parties became illegal.”70 Against commercialized house parties the police wielded a powerful tool, the Licensing Act of 1953, which regulated the sale of alcohol, live music, and dancing in any establishment, private or public. During raids of basement parties, officers’ priorities (after turning down radiograms) were to locate the drinks, cash, those in charge, and evidence that they had advertised their parties beforehand. Throughout the 1960s, London police raided West Indian parties to make arrests and issue fines for a lack of permits to sell alcohol, play music, or allow dancing. Impresarios typically defended their parties as mere get-togethers, excuses that arraignment judges rarely accepted. For many black British men, police raids of the parties became a significant and adverse form of contact with the criminal justice system. In the borough of Brent in northwest London, the area with the largest “coloured immigrant” population in England in the late 1960s (7.4% of the borough’s total population), men of color found themselves overrepresented in arrest statistics (12%), with a plurality of these arrests stemming from the alleged sale of alcohol without license at house parties.71 White hostility to black house parties and clubs often stood in place of anxiety over the permanent transformation in the urban landscape. The noise of all-night parties heralded demographic change and not the presence of mere colonial sojourners, as many British citizens had once imagined would be the case with the postwar arrivals. To white officials, the outlets of black social life were not only symbols but also drivers of such change. London police kept a close eye on clubs run by Nigerians and West Indians in Chalk Farm, Camden Town, and Paddington because they might serve as magnets for future settlement. “[T]he presence of these clubs attracts an additional number of negroes to these areas,” wrote a divisional police commander in 1959, “and in the case of the club at Bell Street has resulted in a number of complaints from local white residents of noise.”72 Officials even attributed black victimization at the hands of the notorious slumlord Peter Rachman in early 1960s London—indeed, the rise of the slumlord himself—in part to the West Indian parties. “Cheerful people, and given to much singing, to playing radiograms and to holding parties,” stated a city housing committee, “[black tenants] were not always appreciated as neighbours by the remaining statutory [white] tenants in Rachman’s houses. These started to move out, and what perhaps began naturally Rachman began to exploit.” Even while acknowledging the role of racial prejudice, the housing committee ultimately attributed to noisy immigrants of color a key role in provoking white flight and the slumification of inner London.73 White worry over demographic and social change led governmental agencies to regulate black clubs as a pretext for wider attempts to control the black population. In June 1961, when graffiti appeared throughout Brixton demanding “N—S GET OUT,” West Indians insisted that the Lambeth Borough Council respond to racist acts. Instead of addressing white hatred, however, the council moved to purchase en masse the properties housing black tenants, for the stated purpose of removing individuals who acted as club proprietors. “The Council’s claim is that they are in an all-out drive to rid the borough of the disreputable clubs which have mushroomed all over the borough, and which in a Council session have been described as ‘dens of vice,’” reported the West Indian Gazette. Unlike white-run bars and clubs that came with attendant noise and crime, “coloured noise,” as Claudia Jones pointed out, stood as a harbinger of change in the British way of life. Removing the sources of that noise, white officials hoped, by default eliminated concentrations of black residents from the area.74 Faced with state repression and public opposition, some immigrant organizations actively worked to contain the house parties and their noise. The West Midlands Caribbean Association, in a “campaign to foster better relations with our English neighbours,” leafleted Wolverhampton’s Jamaican neighborhoods with specific demands: Cut down on the number of late night parties; Don’t hold parties during working weekdays, i.e., Mondays to Fridays, if possible; End parties at a reasonable hour say by 11:00 p.m. The music at parties should be muted after 10:30 p.m. Remind guests to cut down on loud talking on the streets, and the slamming of car doors after parties[.]75 Community leaders likely held the sincere belief that noise generated much of the conflict, yet middle class respectability politics also prompted efforts to curtail loud music. In the West Midlands, educated and professional West Indians often sought as well to prevent race-mixing, which they often blamed on working-class Caribbean men. One local leader who considered himself a “better educated immigrant from the Commonwealth” singled out as a problem Jamaicans, “the majority who were working class men with little education,” even as the latter took the lead in resisting white violence. These same working-class Jamaican men who wrongly (according to West Midlands leaders) thought all white English people were racist were also the “irresponsible” part of the community holding disruptive weekend dances.76 Even amid the din of London, community leaders worried over immigrant noise. Commissioner for the West Indies Garnet H. Gordon promised the Metropolitan Police in 1960 that his office tried to stop the “noisy week-end parties.”77 The short-lived community magazine Tropic sounded similar tones when it called for “erasing the social ills which have given Notting Hill a bad name—ills like noisy basement clubs, which are getting fewer and fewer.” Even the leftist Paddington Overseas Students and Workers Committee, while criticizing white prejudice, acknowledged how Caribbean people’s loud music might play into conflicts. In a pamphlet published by the committee and directed at white Londoners, they responded to charges that West Indians made bad neighbors by stating, “Some West Indians are among the free and easy type for they have a jolly, happy-go-lucky temperament. They are not the only people who find the British cold and stand-offish, and in turn it may take them time to learn that too many calypsos make for sleepless nights for the family next door.” They concluded by claiming, “very many do learn and respond very readily to polite requests for a little more quiet.”78 The Immigrants Advisory Committee converted this attitude of West Indian adjustment into policy when it began pressuring Jamaican tenants to turn down their “noisy radiograms,” reports over which the committee filed under the heading “Racial Disturbances.”79 Other settlers refused to accommodate white neighbors or police and instead defended immigrant black leisure. WISC and the West Indian Gazette routinely criticized police harassment and regulation of music, while local Jamaican organizations in Manchester offered legal aid to victims of police brutality from incidents at basement parties.80 Individuals also publicly protested the treatment of fellow immigrants. At one community-police forum in London in 1966, Walter Rodney, at the time a young graduate student from Guyana, “asked about the right of entry into coloured parties saying that he had been at parties when police had entered. They had taken no action because no law was broken but they had not been over-polite and their presence had detracted somewhat from the evening’s enjoyment.” After the police liaison quoted the Licencing Act, “Mr. Rodney said that while police had the right to enter the premises where an offence was being committed he thought it was wrong for them to assume that liquor was being sold illegally at all coloured parties.” According to the police report on the forum, Rodney argued that “far too many innocent parties were interrupted without real cause. There was some feeling over this question and two other members of the audience endorsed Mr. Rodney’s views.” Rodney went on to accuse the police of planting drugs on West Indians. “Rodney is a sincere and highly intelligent man and I thought his ‘few words’ highly appropriate,” concluded the police liaison. This reasoned response to community criticisms was the rare exception. Two years later another Metropolitan Police commander declared that “West Indian parties are the greatest threat to racial tolerance and harmony” in his borough.81 Walter Rodney and others made little headway against dominant opinion, and the white conflation of immigration, race, and noise carried drastic and lasting effects for the black population and British society in general. Beginning in 1961, news outlets in London and other cities ramped up their coverage of West Indian noisy parties, crime, single mothers, and housing conflicts. In the wake of these stories came a new round of reports and opinion pieces demanding curbs on immigration. That November a white pastor in London, during a BBC radio church broadcast, warned people of color “they were inciting racial conflict by holding wild, all-night parties,” with race riots as an inevitable outcome.82 The benign neglect previously demonstrated by parliamentary majorities faltered, especially in the face of rising unemployment during the 1961 economic recession. By that time, the Home Office had begun collecting crime statistics on the black population that it felt would be “helpful in assessing the case for introducing the Commonwealth Immigrants Bill.” Conservative backbenchers in Parliament spied a political opening and reintroduced the long-circulating bill, and during subsequent debates they read news accounts of West Indian noisy parties into the official parliamentary record. The Commonwealth Immigration Act of 1962, often called the “colour-bar bill,” overturned the unrestricted admittance into the UK for colonial and Commonwealth subjects afforded by the 1948 British Nationality Act, curtailed most new entry from the Caribbean, and even blocked reentry for many residents in Britain who wished to travel temporarily overseas. The erstwhile local efforts to control black noise and black leisure had transmogrified into national anti-immigration policy.83 Domesticity, High Fidelity, and the British Market for Jamaican Music Conflict around West Indian parties did not negate the spirit of celebration they occasioned, and the everyday (and all-night) quality of get-togethers signaled the crafting of shared lives in a new country. During the heyday of immigration, Donald Hinds observed firsthand how music stood for more than just newcomers’ self-made entertainment but also provided the sonic backdrop for an emerging domesticity. As a cub reporter for the West Indian Gazette in 1960, Hinds attended the wedding of Millicent Nelson and Albert Jones, natives of Jamaica, in South London’s Herne Hill district. After a church ceremony, the wedding party retired to the home of the groom’s cousin, where “the guests mixed freely and the gathering generated the subtle warmth of a true West Indian party.” Later in the evening, things heated up when “the more agile” among the guests “crowded the floors” to dance “far into the next morning.” Caribbean marriages were often celebrated with house parties; so too were christenings of newborns. Music marked milestones in family and community life, and rented flats or houses were the likely and sometimes only possible locales for such occasions.84 Behind individuals who created their communities in a new country lurked legal and extralegal measures that profoundly shaped black family life in Britain. Since at least the mid-1950s, settlers had pursued marriage and household practices distinct from those in Jamaica. Unlike in the Caribbean, where female-headed households were an ordinary form of family organization, many immigrant couples chose cohabitation. “The basic rural West Indian kinship pattern of the woman as the head of the family and often the breadwinner is not, on the whole, repeated in Willesden,” commented London social workers. “The men increasingly are asked to take a part in sharing household responsibilities.”85 The Commonwealth Immigration Act encouraged this move toward heterosexual domesticity, as one of its few provisions for continued legal entry into the UK was for purposes of family reunification. The law’s effect in this regard was immediate and dramatic. Adult men had predominated in the first decade of mass migration after 1948, with gender parity attained only in the years just prior to 1962. After the act went into force women and children made up two-thirds of all first-time arrivals from the Caribbean. If immigration restrictions helped reconstitute previously transnational families, routine forms of racial and gender discrimination may also have compelled cohabitation. According to sociologist Sheila Patterson, the “colour tax” or premium that black immigrants paid for London housing compelled many Caribbean women, trapped in low wage occupations, to share rooms with men more out of economic necessity than romantic appeal.86 The rise of two-headed households among settlers also registered the growing influence of black British popular culture. Gender parity in immigration rates in the late 1950s coincided with the advent of Caribbean-run shebeens and town hall dances, whose clientele may have hoped these venues would draw potential romantic partners from similar island backgrounds. Flamingo magazine created just such a narrative for the town hall dances in a 1961 photo essay on a young black woman’s progress in London, which included her successes at work, making friends, and dating. “I go to the pictures quite often,” she confessed. “I met this boy at a West Indian dance.” As the unfinished ending to her story trailed off under a photo of the young couple at the cinema, readers could perhaps imagine a future for the unnamed woman in marriage and family life.87 Once established, many couples preferred to remain in the comfort of their homes, although this did not end their contact with dance music or other leisure pursuits. Pansey Jeffrey, a leading Caribbean social worker and political activist in 1960s London, claimed that women “tend to cling to West Indian entertainment” in the privacy of their apartment flats. Whether couples continued to seek out public venues or kept to their own homes, they remained attached to the wider world of Caribbean popular arts.88 Music was central to a new consumer-driven domesticity. Two-headed households possessed disposable incomes at levels unknown in the Caribbean, and while substantial sums went to remittances to families back home, couples directed some of their cash to new spending habits. Regardless of their feelings about dance halls and shebeens, settlers nevertheless bought record players for their homes. “If you have a Blue Spot [brand of radiogram] and some tunes,” Jah Vego ventured, “you could push back the furniture and have your own little function every Saturday night.” Donald Hinds agreed that the radiogram was “a standard piece of furniture in every room.”89 The connection between consumerism, music, and a new domesticity in Britain was not lost on contemporaries. In London’s Caribbean households, “Most tenants add their own portable paraffin stoves, ornate bedspreads, family photographs, lampshades, and, at a later stage, radiograms and sewing-machines. In only a few cases did I come across a television set,” remarked Sheila Patterson. “West Indians for the most part seem able to provide their own entertainment.” When housing agencies finally admitted black tenants into council estates in the late 1960s, they advised that “Provision of space for modern equipment must be made. Long periods of living in furnished accommodation have led to the purchase of refrigerators, cocktail cabinets and radiograms even with stereophonic sound, before the essentials are able to be owned.”90 Access to music at home may have encouraged the turn to domestic habits. Jim Bentham, the Jamaican bricklayer in E. R. Braithwaite’s autobiographical novel Paid Servant (1962), keeps to himself, buys a television and record player, and waits for his wife Marv to join him in London from Jamaica.91 Household radiograms begged for records, and a network of retail outlets opened, first in London and then in other British cities, to accommodate the rising consumer demand for Jamaican and Caribbean tunes. One of the earliest Caribbean specialty record stores was Paul for Music in London’s East End and Finsbury Park, which in 1962 offered “Blue Beats, Modern and Trad Jazz, Calypsos, etc.”92 By the end of the decade, Paul for Music had been joined by Readings in Clapham Junction, Joe’s Record Shop in Brixton, and Derek’s Records in Hornsey. These independent businesses, however, were dwarfed by the retail chains Musicland and Muzik City—the latter named after Coxson Dodd’s shop in Kingston—each with a dozen record shops or stalls sprinkled throughout the city’s significant black population centers. Entrepreneurs responded to consumers beyond the capital with specialty music businesses of their own in Birmingham, Leeds, and Manchester.93 These shops had little use for mass market wholesale suppliers and instead received their stock directly from the Kingston-based record labels themselves, many of which had set up offices or hired agents in London. These were not sophisticated international supply chains. For many years Island, Pama, Trojan, and the other Jamaican record labels depended on bespoke distribution, with an employee in a car or van hand-delivering the latest releases to shops across the British Isles.94 Along the way they made stops at other outlets, too. Dyke & Dryden in Tottenham (North London) was the country’s first black-owned hair care company, yet it also advertised itself as “Specialists in West Indian records.” Dyke & Dryden was not alone in diversifying its services. Carifta Travel and Records in nearby Stoke Newington offered exactly those goods and services, while Music Centre Travel Tours in Leeds sold package trips, reggae records, cosmetics, and wigs.95 Like some of the artists whose recordings they stocked, black businesses often engaged in both music and community organizing. Theo Campbell of Theo’s Records—Britain’s first black record shop, which opened in Brixton Market in 1960—was also a Jamaican political activist and editor of the West Indian Gazette. “Music lovers fill Theo Campbell’s record shop from morning until evening,” reported one community magazine, while upstairs Campbell, Claudia Jones, and their staff put together the Gazette.96 Fellow Jamaican immigrant Len Dyke, co-owner of Dyke & Dryden, helped organize WISC in the late 1950s and took a leading role in the fight against anti-immigration legislation and police harassment of black youth. As small business owners in and of the community, black entrepreneurs used their resources to push for immigrant rights and inclusion.97 This same public engagement turned many businesses, in particular the hair salons and beauty colleges, into major benefactors of Jamaican music in Britain. Dyke & Dryden and others in the beauty industry, which were some of the more successful Caribbean businesses in 1950s and 60s Britain, sponsored reggae bands and community dances. Jamaican musical acts found steady work at holiday pageants and beauty contests as well as at the annual fashion shows held for cosmetology school graduations. Typical was the January 1969 dance and beauty contest in Ealing, which drew Jamaicans from across northwest London, perhaps to watch the fashion shows or perhaps, equally, for the performances by Jamaican singer Owen Gray and master of ceremonies, reggae artist Count Prince Miller.98 The patronage of the hair salons and beauty colleges to the UK-based reggae artists underscored the place of black women in the making of black British consumer culture. By the late 1960s, Caribbean community magazines offered women’s pages or advice columns filled with hints for leisure, shopping, and entertainment. One short-lived black periodical stressed the importance of music for young single women. “Music makes up for the conversation boobs. It covers any nasty gaps when you are in the kitchen and the other guests suddenly find awkward silence, and it sets a mood for the evening,” one article proffered. “If you don’t have a record player, it’s a good idea to borrow a radio, at least, and have something relatively soft and pleasant playing when the people arrive.”99 The women’s page of Joffa, the London-based magazine of the Jamaican Overseas Family and Friends Association, featured reviews and photos of electronics and other home products, often a reflection of their advertisers’ wares. Home hi-fi record players were a constant feature and topic of discussion in the lifestyle sections of the community press, revealing a middle-class, black domestic consumerism, one that was perhaps attainable for some and perhaps merely aspirational for others.100 The magazines and neighborhood record shops flaunted a lifestyle of urban domesticity, yet West Indians living outside the larger immigrant areas still found ways to access the latest Jamaican recorded music. Even when local retail outlets in white areas refused to carry Caribbean recordings, far-flung fans could rely on alternative means to obtain the latest releases. Flamingo magazine, for one, offered free 45 singles as a promotion to its magazine subscribers, including Lord Creator’s “Independent Jamaica Calypso” in its January 1963 issue.101 A more common and reliable source of music was the growing mail order industry. The Beat & Commercial Record Co. in London offered by post “West Indian Records at Their Best,” including the latest hits by Derrick Morgan, Desmond Dekker, Keith and Enid, and other top Jamaican artists. Beat & Commercial soon enough faced competition from newer mail order companies, a likely sign of the lucrative nature of serving geographically isolated fans of blue beat, reggae, and other Caribbean music genres.102 As Jamaican music tightened its grip over black cultural life, Britain became the single largest market for recordings from Jamaica. Households and individual consumers drove the demand for Jamaica-made music, and the network of sound systems, community magazines, town hall dances, and beautician-school reggae shows served as advertising for the retail trade. As a major market for records, overseas Jamaican and black British fans reoriented the Kingston music industry away from its focus on recordings and towards promotion via live concerts. Stage performances in Jamaica, which had always been secondary in importance to the sound system dances, became an essential part of marketing on the other side of the Atlantic. By the late 1960s, Kingston record labels acknowledged this dynamic by sending their artists to give concerts in the UK, often backed by expatriate Jamaican musicians. Four years after the Millie Small phenomenon, the singer, sound system operator, and impresario Prince Buster staged one of the first successful British tours straight from Jamaica on the back of his 1967 international hit, “Al Capone.”103 In the wake of Buster’s tour, labels arranged UK concert dates for their leading Jamaican performers to promote records. Many artists made repeated trips to Britain for national tours to exploit the market for Jamaican music for home consumption in the black community. “That West Indian flavoured ska music, better known as reggae, is striking a strong chart fever these days,” reported Daily Mirror’s show business writer, Don Short, in late 1969. “Now its pioneers, Desmond Dekker, the Upsetters and Jimmy Cliff among them, plan a major nation-wide tour in two months time. The way I see it, the trend may have blown by then.” Over the following decades, reggae artists and their transnational audiences would prove this dismissive assessment one of Short’s worst predictions.104 The Settled Sound of Black Britain When Henry Louis Gates, Jr., traveled through London’s Ladbroke Grove neighborhood in the mid-1970s, he heard “no sound other than the reggae, the monotonous, tyrannical, pounding beat of reggae.” Black Britain was, claimed Gates, “united by a common situation vis-a-vis ‘da monkeys’ (the English) and by a lingua franca known as reggae.” Outsider impositions aside, Gates touched on a significant cultural and generational shift. Jamaican music had rarely been heard among the big band jazz and tropical sounds to which immigrant audiences danced in the 1950s, yet the island’s popular music twenty years later became the cultural bedrock for those immigrants’ children. As a British-born generation took over the institutions founded by their parents, however, they endured the same harassment from police, including raids on their clubs, political organizations, and other community spaces. Second-generation black Britons, whose families hailed from many parts of the Commonwealth or empire, found in Jamaican reggae, patois, and Rasta-inspired symbols a common idiom to express ongoing struggles in racist Britain. They borrowed from the music the Rastafarian image of Babylon—the police, or more generally, the hostile white capitalist world—to make sense of their shared situation. Until hip hop arrived in Britain in the mid-1980s, Jamaican reggae was the unrivaled sound of black British youth.105 Black British audiences and consumers, unlike whites, are only occasionally recognized in histories of Jamaican music, yet by settling, working, and creating leisure spaces in postwar Britain they provided a vital and often lucrative outlet for the Kingston music industry. At the same time, Jamaican music(ians) helped Caribbean settlers, and their native-born children, compose social relations under “endless pressure” from white police, government officials, and neighbors. The recursive nature of dance music, which describes Jamaica’s artistic output at every stage of its development, can be extrapolated to a national or even global-diasporic level. Increasingly over the postwar years in Britain, Jamaican music motivated the dance, even as the dancers established the environment that allowed the music to thrive. The ability of migrants to channel a transnational dance music culture, which they had helped create, toward the establishment of new black communities, often under dire conditions, is a testament to the capacity of that music and its devotees to shape wider social life.106 Footnotes I would like to thank the JSH editors and the anonymous reader for their helpful suggestions on my manuscript, and my colleagues Marissa J. Moorman and Ellen D. Wu. 1 “I Spend a Night in Notting Hill Police Station,” West Indian Gazette, February 1962; see also “West Indians Taste New Beer,” West Indian Gazette, May 1961. For Claudia Jones’s activism, see Carole Boyce-Davies, Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones (Durham, NC, 2008). 2 For labor and housing issues, see Kennetta Hammond Perry, London Is the Place for Me: Black Britons, Citizenship, and the Politics of Race (New York, 2015); Peter Alexander and Rick Halpern, eds., Racializing Class, Classifying Race: Labour and Difference in Britain, the USA and Africa (London, 2000); Mike Phillips and Trevor Phillips, Windrush: The Irresistible Rise of Multi-Racial Britain (London, 1998); Lydia Lindsey, “The Split-Labor Phenomenon: Its Impact on West Indian Workers as a Marginal Working Class in Birmingham, England, 1948–1962,” The Journal of Negro History 78, no. 2 (1993): 83–109; Ron Ramdin, The Making of the Black Working Class in Britain (Aldershot, 1987); Peter Fryer, Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (London, 1984). 3 The vital role of West and South African artists in creating music in Britain, often side-by-side with West Indians, is beyond the scope of the current essay, but see Marc Matera, Black London: The Imperial Metropolis and Decolonization in the Twentieth Century (Oakland, 2015). 4 Simon Jones, Black Music, White Youth: The Reggae Tradition from JA to UK (Basingstoke, 1988); Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness (Cambridge, 1993); quoted from Simon Broughton, World Music: The Rough Guide (London, 1994), 521. 5 The list is nearly endless but see Michael de Koningh and Marc Griffiths, Tighten Up! The History of Reggae in the UK (London, 2003); David Katz, Solid Foundation: An Oral History of Reggae (New York, 2010); Heather Augustyn, Ska: An Oral History (Jefferson, NC, 2010); Steve Barrow and Peter Dalton, The Rough Guide to Reggae (London, 2004). For the rare works that address historical context see Sebastian Clarke, Jah Music: The Evolution of the Popular Jamaican Song (London, 1983); and Lloyd Bradley, This is Reggae Music (New York, 2002 [2001]). 6 Steven J. Tepper, “Stop the Beat: Quiet Regulation and Cultural Conflict,” Sociological Forum 24, no. 2 (2009), 276–306. For the importance of (dance) audiences, see Marc Slobin, Subcultural Sounds: Micromusics of the West (Wesleyan, 1992), 8, 98–100. 7 Fight in Soho, Mass Observation Online: Music, Dancing, and Jazz Collection, S.S. 14/4/39, XXIX/2:1. 8 Raymond A. Thomson, “Dance Bands and Dance Halls in Greenock, 1945–55,” Popular Music 8, no. 2 (1989), 148; St. Clair Drake, “Value System, Social Structure, and Race Relations in the British Isles” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 1954), 504, quoted from 484. 9 Concert program, A Harry Fielding Concert, London, 2 September 1956, David Webb Virtual Archive, www.infotextmanuscripts.org/webb/index.html, accessed December 14, 2016; Inwards Passenger Lists, Empire Windrush, London, June 21, 1948, National Archives of the UK [hereafter: NAUK], BT 26/1237; Jason Toynbee, “Race, History, and Black British Jazz,” Black Music Research Journal 33, no. 1 (2013), 1–25; Matera, Black London, 158–60. For immigration statistics see T. E. Smith, Commonwealth Immigration: Flows and Policies (London, 1981), 91–114, 154, 163. 10 For the diversity of big band sounds in Kingston, see, e.g., “Glass Bucket Gayer for Festive Season,” Gleaner, December 8, 1945; John Cowley, “West Indian Gramophone Records in Britain, 1927–1950,” in Under the Imperial Carpet: Essays in Black History, 1780–1950, eds. Rainer Lotz and Ian Pegg (Crawley, 1986), 250; quoted from John Cowley, “London is the Place for Me: Caribbean Music in the Context of Empire, 1900–60,” in Black Music in Britain, ed. Paul Oliver (Philadelphia, 1990), 62–63. 11 Paul Gilroy, “There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack”: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation (Chicago, 1991), 160–61. 12 For the war years, see Sonya O. Rose, Which People’s War? National Identity and Citizenship in Britain, 1939–1945 (New York, 2003), 90, 249–251; Graham Smith, When Jim Crow Met John Bull: Black American Soldiers in World War Two (New York, 1987). 13 “RAF ‘Battle’ Over Girls,” Daily Mail, February 9, 1946. 14 Learie Constantine, The Colour Bar (London, 1954), 67. 15 “The Colour Bar,” Manchester Guardian, September 13, 1943. 16 “Andy Hamilton Obituary,” Guardian, June 11, 2012; quoted from Institute for Race Relations, Coloured People in Britain: A Summary of Press News and Comment, London Metropolitan Archives (LMA), ACC/1888/120 [hereafter: IRR Press Summary], July 1957; see also Marcus Collins, “Pride and Prejudice: West Indian Men in Mid-Twentieth-Century Britain,” Journal of British Studies 40, no. 3 (2001), 391–418. 17 Sydney F. Collins, “The Social Position of White and ‘Half-Caste’ Women in Colored Groupings in Britain,” American Sociological Review 16, no. 6 (1951), 797; Edward Clark, “Light and Dark in British Novels,” Phylon 18, no. 1 (1957), 97–99; Darrell Newton, Paving the Empire Road: BBC Television and West Indian Immigration (New York, 2013); quoted from “‘Mixed’ Contacts in Dance Halls,” Times, October 7, 1957. 18 IRR Press Summary, September 1955. 19 IRR Press Summary, March 1956; IRR Press Summary, February 1956. 20 IRR Press Summary, June 1958. 21 IRR Press Summary, September 1955. 22 W. George Brown, From Windrush to Lewisham (London, 1999), 49; “Dance Halls Impose a Colour Bar,” Ilford Recorder, April 30, 1959; IRR Press Summary, May 1959; ibid., February 1959. 23 Colour Bar Act of 1951, House of Commons, Bill 33, 1950–51 session, 17 November 1950; “Britain,” IRR News Letter, January 1961; IRR Press Summary, February 1959. 24 IRR Press Summary, August 1958; quoted from IRR Press Summary, January 1959. 25 IRR Press Summary, February 1959; IRR Press Summary, January 1959. 26 Klaus Nathaus, “Turning Values into Revenue: The Markets and the Field of Popular Music in the US, the UK and West Germany (1940s to 1980s),” Historical Social Research/Historische Sozialforschung 36, no. 3 (2011), 138. For the ban on US musical acts in Britain, see Catherine Parsonage, The Evolution of Jazz in Britain, 1880–1935 (Ashgate, 2005), 255. For the ban’s effect on colonial musicians, see Matera, Black London, 150. 27 For black artists at the BBC, see Stephen Bourne, Black in the British Frame: The Black Experience in British Film and Television (New York, 2001); Darrell Newton, Paving the Empire Road: BBC Television and West Indian Immigration (Manchester, 2013). For an earlier period, see Matera, Black London, 157. 28 “Social Club for West Indians,” Times, September 7, 1956; “‘Mixed’ Contacts in Dance Halls,” Times, October 7, 1957. 29 Edward Pilkington, Beyond the Mother Country: Caribbeans and the Notting Hill White Riots (London, 1988); Perry, London Is the Place for Me, 89–125; Phillips and Phillips, Windrush, 170–80. 30 “Caribbean Carnival Ball,” West Indian Gazette, January 1960; “Caribbean Carnival in London,” Flamingo, June 1962; Boyce-Davies, Left of Karl Marx, 174 ff. 31 Ken Pryce, Endless Pressure: A Study of West Indian Lifestyles in Bristol (London, 1993), 97, 368; Bill Schwarz, “‘The Only White Man in There’: The Re-racialisation of England, 1956–1968,” Race & Class 38, no. 1 (1996), 65–78; St. Clair Drake, “Value Systems, Social Structure, and Race Relations,” 454, quoted from 504. 32 BCA Newsletter No. 3, n.d. [August 1960], British-Caribbean Association (BCA) bundle, LMA, ACC/1888/116. 33 West Indian Student Union Christmas Dance, West Indian Gazette, December 1960; West Indian Gazette, October 1963. 34 Commander’s Report, Bow Street Station, E Division, London, October 7, 1954, NAUK, MEPO 2/9563; “Mr. Handsome Dance,” Flamingo, December 1962. 35 See various stories in Birmingham Post, December 23, 1958; Birmingham Evening Despatch, December 22, 1958; quoted from “Beauty Contest-Magic-Dance,” West Indian Gazette, October 1963. 36 “Tropical Fiesta Cha-Cha and Calypso Finals,” Flamingo, May 1963. 37 “WI Gazette’s 4th Anniversary Dance,” West Indian Gazette, May 1961. 38 “The Ska Hits London—But They Call It Blue Beat,” Gleaner, March 17, 1964; see also lyrics of Derrick and Patsy, “National Dance” (Beverleys/Island WI-224A, 1965); Millie Small, “My Boy Lollipop” (Smash 1893, 1964); Paul Kauppila, “‘From Memphis to Kingston’: An Investigation into the Origin of Jamaican Ska,” Social and Economic Studies 55, no. 1/2 (2006), 75–91. 39 “New to the Charts: Ezz Reco,” New Musical Express, March 6, 1964; Albert McCarthy, The Dance Band Era: The Dancing Era from Ragtime to Swing, 1910–1950 (Radnor, PA, 1971), 155. 40 “The Cultural Scene,” Teamwork, March 1964; London Newsletter, February 1961; WIAC Report of the Meeting, August 7, 1960; all located in: LMA, West Indian Affairs Committee, ACC/1888/184. 41 Teamwork, March 1964. 42 “Independence Dance at Derby,” WI Gazette August/September 1964; “The New Crusade,” Teamwork, June 1963; “Rasta Band Leader” Flamingo, August 1963; see also de Koningh and Griffiths, Tighten Up!, 14, 16. 43 See, e.g., West Midlands Conciliation Committee, Agenda Minutes, January–June 1967, Records of the Commission for Racial Equality, NAUK, CK 2/64. 44 “Jamaican Influx at Birmingham,” Times, October 22, 1954; but cf. Clifford Hill, Black and White in Harmony (New York, 1969 [1958]), 13–14. 45 “A Unique Blend of Commonwealth Artistic Talents,” Illustrated London News, September 25, 1965. 46 Donald Hinds, “The ‘Island’ of Brixton,” Oral History 8, no. 1 (1980), 51. 47 “Midlands Face Unemployment,” West Indian Gazette, February 1963; see also Ramdin, Making of the Black Working Class, 439. 48 Report by Clive Anderson, London Strategic Policy Unit, n.d. [April 1986], LMA, London Strategic Planning Unit [LSPU], LSPU/REPG/05/024; Hinds, “‘Island’ of Brixton,” 51; see also Pryce, Endless Pressure, 97–100. 49 Katrina Hazzard-Gordon, Jookin’: The Rise of Social Dance Formations in African-American Culture (Philadelphia, 2010), 118–19; Livio Sansone, “The Making of Suriland,” in Caribbean Migration to Western Europe and the United States, eds. Ramón Grosfoguel, Ana Margarita Cervantes-Rodríguez, and Eric Mileants (Temple, 2008), 177; Charles Collins, “Distribution of Commonwealth Immigrants in Greater London,” Ekistics 32, no. 188 (1971), 18. For yard parties in Kingston, see “Bongo Neville and His Yard,” Abeng, June 8, 1969. 50 Dilip Hiro, Black British White British (New York, 1973), 33–34; Darcus Howe, “Fighting Back: West Indian Youth and the Police in Notting Hill,” Race Today, December 1973, 334; quoted from Bradley, This Is Reggae Music, 115–16. 51 Brown, Windrush to Lewisham, 49, 60, 61. 52 Incidents Involving White and Coloured Persons, Police Report, Brixton Station, June 7, 1960, NAUK, MEPO 2/9992. 53 Vice in Stepney, August 12, 1958, LMA, LCC/CL/GP/01/216; Ramdin, Making of the Black Working Class, 438–39; Howe, “Fighting Back,” 334. 54 Fight in Soho, S.S. 14/4/39, XXIX/2:1, Mass Observation Online, Music, Dancing, and Jazz Collection. 55 Neville Dawes, The Last Enchantment (Leeds, 2009 [1960]), 238. 56 Advertisement, Afro-Caribbean Society dance, West Indian Gazette, October 1963; “Duke Vin,” Daily Telegraph, November 23, 2012; “Count Suckle Obituary,” Guardian, June 4, 2014; Sarah Thornton, “Strategies for Reconstructing the Popular Past,” Popular Music 9, no. 1 (1990), 87–95. For one of the earliest sound systems in Jamaica, see “Get Together Function,” Gleaner, February 19, 1946; see also Stoltzoff, Wake the Town and Tell the People. 57 Hinds, “‘Island’ of Brixton,” 51; advertisement for Contact Magazine and Afro-Caribbean Society dance, West Indian Gazette, October 1963. 58 Katz, Solid Foundation, 5; de Koningh and Griffiths, Tighten Up!, 166. For the significance of remittances and transatlantic family networks, see G. J. Clark et al., “Some Aspects of the Economy of Jamaica,” Staff Papers (International Monetary Fund) 10, no. 2 (1963), 267; Stuart Philpott, West Indian Migration: The Montserrat Case (New York, 1973), 190. 59 “Meet Laurel Aitken,” West Indian Gazette, November 1960. 60 “Let’s Talk About People,” West Indian Gazette, July/August 1963. 61 “Blue Beat at the Flamingo,” Record Mirror, 18 April 1964. 62 “Classified,” Joffa, January 1969; “West Indian Music Hall,” West Indian World, October 1, 1971; Classified: Entertainments, Wembley Observer, April 24, 1970. 63 “Curb on the Clubs,” Evening Standard, October 30, 1958; “Clubs are Vice Dens says Hayward,” Evening Standard, January 6, 1959. 64 “Tenant Defied Threats and Made Complaints,” Telegraph, August 2, 1963; “Rid Us of These Party Pests Plead Families,” News of the World, July 9, 1961. For borough papers see, e.g., “Party Raided—Girl Found in Basement, Court Told,” South London Observer, August 9, 1962; “Man Stabbed at Party,” Hackney Gazette, May 4, 1965. 65 “Coloured Voice,” Flamingo, October 1961. For the English culture of complaining about neighbors’ noise see Geoffrey Gorer, Exploring English Character (London, 1955), 59. 66 Dudley Sorrell to London Council for Social Services, Hackney, May 31, 1956, LMA/ACC/1888/116: West Indians in London, Folder Conference 1956. 67 “Coloured Neighbors,” Guardian, August 17, 1961. 68 “Police Accused of Violence,” West Indian Gazette, January 1962; West Midlands Conciliation Committee, Agenda and Minutes, Case No. 71, July 26, 1967, NAUK, CK 2/65l; Interview with Gerlin Bean, February 20, 2009, Black Cultural Archives, ORAL/1/3; quoted from Commander’s Report, Hornsey Station (Y Division), May 22, 1960, NAUK, MEPO 2/9992. 69 “Britain,” IRR News Letter, January 1963. 70 Hunte, Nigger Hunting in England? (London, 1966), 3; Hinds, “‘Island’ of Brixton,” 51. 71 London County Council, Control of Clubs Registered Under the Licensing Act 1953, January 23, 1957, LMA, LCC/CL/GP/01/68; “Police Raided Basement ‘Celebration,’” Walthamstow Post, March 16, 1961; IRR Newsletter January [?] 1963, 8–9; Commander’s Report, Harlesden Station (Q division), September 13, 1968, NAUK, MEPO 2/10594. 72 Albany Street Station Commander to A.C.A., September 16, 1959, NAUK, MEPO 2/10011. 73 Report of the Committee on Housing in Greater London, Cmdn. 2605 (London, March 1965), 221. 74 “Brixton and Decency,” West Indian Gazette, June 1961. 75 Circular, West Midland Caribbean Association, Wolverhampton, n.d. [July 1963], NAUK, MEPO 2/9854. 76 IRR Press Summary, October 1957. 77 Garnet H. Gordon to Police Commissioner, November 3, 1960, NAUK, MEPO 2/9854. 78 POSWC, West Indians? Some Questions Answered (London, 1961), 9; “Now There Are No Dogs,” Tropic, March 1960. 79 Minutes of the Meeting of the Working Sub-Committee, [Kensington?] Town Hall, November 12, 1958, LMA, ACC/1888/036. 80 Ramdin, Making of the Black Working Class, 438–39. 81 Chief Inspector to A.C.A., March 14, 1966, NAUK, MEPO 2/9854; Commander’s Report, West Ham Station (K Division), September 9, 1968, NAUK, MEPO 2/10594; see also “Noisy Parties and the Law,” Sunday Times, December 30, 1973. 82 Sheila Patterson, Immigrants in Industry (London, 1968), 34; quoted from “Threat to ‘Wild Parties’ Clergyman,” Telegraph, November 5, 1961. 83 Commons Sitting, December 5, 1961; December 12, 1961, HC Hansard, 1961–1962, Fifth Series, Volume 650:1176; “The Colour-Bar Bill,” New Statesman, November 17, 1961; quoted from Minutes: Statistics of Coloured Persons Convicted of Certain Offences, August 2, 1961, NAUK, HO 344/160. 84 IRR Newsletter, January [?] 1963; quoted from “Jamaican Wedding,” West Indian Gazette, December 1960. 85 British National Conference on Social Welfare, Communities with Substantial Numbers of Immigrants, October 1962, LMA, 4462/P/01/019; see also Sheila Patterson, Dark Strangers: A Sociological Study of the Absorption of a Recent West Indian Migrant Group in Brixton, South London (Bloomington, 1963), 303–6; “Some Conclusions,” Punch, April 1, 1964. 86 “Commonwealth Immigration Act, 1962: Notes on U.K. Statistics up to End November 1962 (Supplement),” IRR News Letter, January 1963; “Coloured People in Britain,” Sunday Times, May 22, 1960; quoted from Patterson, Dark Strangers, 212. 87 “London Is the Place for Me,” Flamingo, September 1961. 88 P.M.J. [Pansy Jeffrey], Caribbean Immigrants, July 18, 1967, LMA 4462/P/01/005A/01. 89 Bradley, This Is Reggae Music, 116; Hinds, “‘Island’ of Brixton,” 51. 90 Patterson, Dark Strangers, 183–84; House of Commons, Select Committee on Race Relations and Immigration, 1970–71, Housing 3:464. 91 Betty Davison, “No Place Back Home: A Study of Jamaicans Returning to Kingston, Jamaica,” Race 9, no. 4 (1968), 501–2; quoted from “As-You-Were West Indians Go Back Home,” Reynolds News, October 14, 1956; E. R. Braithwaite, Paid Servant (London, 1962). 92 Paul for Music advertisement, Flamingo, December 1962. 93 See Island Records full-page advertisement, Jamaican Weekly Gleaner, November 20, 1968; de Koningh and Griffiths, Tighten Up!, 173. 94 Tighten Up!, 137; see also Jamaica Top Twenty advertisement, Jamaican Weekly Gleaner, December 11, 1968. 95 Tanisha Ford, Liberated Threads: Black Women, Style, and the Global Politics of Soul (Chapel Hill, 2016), 132; quoted from Dyke & Drysen advertisement, Joffa, August 1969. 96 Donald Hinds, “The West Indian Gazette: Claudia Jones and the Black Press in Britain,” Race & Class 50, no. 1 (2008), 88; quoted from “Living in Brixton,” Tropic, August 1960. 97 L.C. Dyke of WISC to Chief Superintendent of Police, London, n.d. [April 1972], NAUK, MEPO 2/11238; “Len Dyke,” Guardian, August 13, 2006. 98 Miss Dyke & Dryden 1972 souvenir program, Scrapbook bundle 1972–1973, Hackney Archives, D/F/KEL/3; “Scene Crawling,” Joffa, March 1969; “A Short History of the West Indian League,” Joffa, August 1969. 99 “A Girl’s Guide to Budget Entertaining,” This Month, November–December 1971. 100 “A Tonic for Your Home,” Joffa, March 1969. 101 “Another Fabulous Free Gift,” Flamingo, January 1963. 102 Advertisement for Afro-Caribbean Record Club, Daylight, May 1964; advertisement, King Street Records, West Indian World, June 11, 1971; quoted from Beat & Commercial Record Co. advertisement, Flamingo, May 1963. 103 “The Gang Buster is Here!” Disc, March 4, 1967; “Buster Dates,” Record Mirror, March 11, 1967; see also Dennis Howard, “Punching for Recognition: The Juke Box as a Key Instrument in the Development of Popular Jamaican Music,” Caribbean Quarterly 53, no. 4 (2007), 32–46. 104 “Pop Circular,” Daily Mirror, November 29, 1969; see also “Upsetters, Pioneers Fly in, Hoping for a White Christmas,” Disc, November 29, 1969. 105 Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “Black London,” The Antioch Review 34, no. 3 (1976), 302–3; see also “Announcements: W.I.S.C.” Joffa, March 1969; Phillips and Phillips, Windrush, 296–97. 106 Slobin, Subcultural Sounds, esp. 8; quoted from Ken Pryce, Endless Pressure. © The Author(s) 2018. 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TI - Sonic Settlements: Jamaican Music, Dancing, and Black Migrant Communities in Postwar Britain
JF - Journal of Social History
DO - 10.1093/jsh/shy001
DA - 2018-11-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/sonic-settlements-jamaican-music-dancing-and-black-migrant-communities-N5WGFpvLPX
SP - 353
VL - 52
IS - 2
DP - DeepDyve
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