Dennis Brown

Dennis Emmanuel Brown CD (1 February 1957 – 1 July 1999) was a Jamaican reggae singer.

Dennis Brown was born on February 1,1957, in Victoria Jubilee Hospital in Kingston, Jamaica.

During his prolific career, which began in the late 1960s when he was aged eleven, he recorded more than 75 albums and was one of the major stars of lovers rock, a subgenre of reggae.

Bob Marley cited Brown as his favourite singer, dubbing him "The Crown Prince of Reggae", and Brown would prove influential on future generations of reggae singers.

His father Arthur was a scriptwriter, actor, and journalist, and he grew up in a large tenement yard between North Street and King Street in Kingston with his parents, three elder brothers and a sister, although his mother died in the 1960s.

He began his singing career at the age of nine, while still at junior school, with an end-of-term concert the first time he performed in public, although he had been interested in music from an even earlier age, and as a youngster was a fan of American balladeers such as Brook Benton, Sam Cooke, Frank Sinatra, and Dean Martin.

He cited Nat King Cole as one of his greatest early influences.

He regularly hung around JJ's record store on Orange Street in the rocksteady era and his relatives and neighbours would often throw Brown pennies to hear him sing in their yard.

Brown's first professional appearance came at the age of eleven, when he visited "Tit for Tat" a local West Kingston Nightclub where his brother Basil was performing a comedy routine, and where he made a guest appearance with the club's resident group, the Fabulous Falcons (a group that included Cynthia Richards, David "Scotty" Scott, and Noel Brown).

On the strength of this performance he was asked to join the group as a featured vocalist.

When the group performed at a JLP conference at the National Arena, Brown sang two songs – Desmond Dekker's "Unity" and Johnnie Taylor's "Ain't That Loving You" – and after the audience showered the stage with money, he was able to buy his first suit with the proceeds.

Bandleader Byron Lee performed on the same bill, and was sufficiently impressed with Brown to book him to perform on package shows featuring visiting US artists, where he was billed as the "Boy Wonder".

As a young singer Brown was influenced by older contemporaries such as Delroy Wilson (whom he later cited as the single greatest influence on his style of singing), Errol Dunkley, John Holt, Ken Boothe, and Bob Andy.

Brown's first recording was an original song called "Lips of Wine" for producer Derrick Harriott, but when this was not released, he recorded for Clement "Coxsone" Dodd's Studio One label, and his first session yielded the single "No Man is an Island", recorded when Brown was aged twelve and released in late 1969.

The single received steadily increasing airplay for almost a year before becoming a huge hit throughout Jamaica.

Brown recorded up to a dozen sessions for Dodd, amounting to around thirty songs, and also worked as a backing singer on sessions by other artists, including providing harmonies along with Horace Andy and Larry Marshall on Alton Ellis's Sunday Coming album.

Brown was advised by fellow Studio One artist Ellis to learn guitar to help with his songwriting, and after convincing Dodd to buy him an instrument, was taught the basics by Ellis.

These Studio One recordings were collected on two albums, No Man is an Island and If I Follow my Heart (the title track penned by Alton Ellis), although Brown had left Studio One before either was released.

In 1972, Brown began an association that would result in his breakthrough as an internationally successful artist; He was asked by Joe Gibbs to record an album for him, and one of the tracks recorded as a result, "Money in my Pocket", was a hit with UK reggae audiences and quickly became a favourite of his live performances.

This original version of "Money in my Pocket" was in fact produced by Winston "Niney" Holness on behalf of Gibbs, with musical backing from the Soul Syndicate.

In the same year, Brown performed as part of a Christmas morning showcase in Toronto, along with Delroy Wilson, Scotty, Errol Dunkley, and the Fabulous Flames, where he was billed as the "Boy Wonder of Jamaica" and was considered the star of the show in a local newspaper review.

The song's popularity in the UK was established with the release of a deejay version, "A-So We Stay (Money in Hand)", credited to Big Youth and Dennis Brown, which outsold the original single and topped the Jamaican singles chart.

Brown and Holness became close, even sharing a house in Pembroke Hall.

He went on to record for several producers including Lloyd Daley ("Baby Don't Do It" and "Things in Life"), Prince Buster ("One Day Soon" and "If I Had the World"), and Phil Pratt ("Black Magic Woman", "Let Love In", and "What About the Half"), before returning to work with Derrick Harriott, recording a string of popular singles including "Silhouettes", "Concentration", "He Can't Spell", and "Musical Heatwave", with the pick of these tracks collected on the Super Reggae and Soul Hits album in 1973.

Brown also recorded for Vincent "Randy" Chin ("Cheater"), Dennis Alcapone ("I Was Lonely"), and Herman Chin Loy ("It's Too Late" and "Song My Mother Used to Sing") among others, with Brown still at school at this stage of his career.

Brown followed this with another collaboration with Holness on "Westbound Train", which was the biggest Jamaican hit of summer 1973, and Brown's star status was confirmed when he was voted Jamaica's top male vocalist in a poll by Swing magazine the same year.

Brown followed this success with "Cassandra" and "No More Will I Roam", and tracks such as "Africa" and "Love Jah", displaying Brown's Rastafari beliefs, became staples on London's sound system scene.

In 1973, Brown was hospitalized, due to fatigue caused by overwork; at the time, rumours spread that he only had one lung and had only a week to live, or had contracted tuberculosis.

He was advised to take an extended break from performing, and concentrated instead on his college studies.

Brown returned to music and toured the United Kingdom for the first time in late summer 1974 as part of a Jamaican showcase, along with Cynthia Richards, Al Brown, Sharon Forrester, and The Maytals, after which he was invited to stay on for further dates (where he was backed by The Cimarons, staying in the UK for another three months. While in the UK, he recorded for the first time since his hospitalization, working with producer Sydney Crooks, and again backed by the Cimarons. While Brown was in the UK, Gibbs released an album collecting recordings Brown made earlier in Jamaica, released as The Best of Dennis Brown, and Brown's first single to get a proper UK release was issued on the Synda label – "No More Will I Roam". He returned to Jamaica for Christmas, but six weeks later was back in the UK, now with Holness in tow as his business manager, to negotiate a record deal with Trojan Records, the first Brown album to be released as a result being Just Dennis, although the pair would be left out of pocket after Trojan's collapse and subsequent buyout by Saga Records.

On their return to Jamaica, Brown and Holness resumed recording in earnest with tracks for a new album, including "So Long Rastafari", "Boasting", and "Open the Gate".

During 1975, Brown also recorded one-off sessions for Sonia Pottinger ("If You leave Me") and Bunny Lee ("So Much Pain", a duet with Johnny Clarke), and the first recordings began to appear on Brown's new DEB Music label.

In the wake of the Trojan collapse, Brown and Holness arranged a deal with local independent label owners Castro Brown (who ran Morpheus Records) and Larry Lawrence (Ethnic Fight) to distribute their releases in the UK.

Brown saw the UK as the most important market to target and performed for five consecutive nights at the Georgian Club in Croydon to raise funds to start his new DEB Music label with Castro Brown.

In early 1976, Castro secured a deal with Radio London disc jockey Charlie Gillett for Morpheus (and hence DEB) output to be issued through the latter's Oval Records, which had a distribution deal with Virgin Records, but after a dispute over Castro's separate supply of these records to London record shops, the deal was scrapped and the early DEB releases suffered from a lack of promotion.

Later that year, Brown voiced two tracks at Lee "Scratch" Perry's Black Ark studio, "Take a Trip to Zion" and "Wolf and Leopard", the latter of which was a hit in Jamaica and would prove to be one of Brown's most popular songs, with a lyric criticizing those criminals who "rode the natty dread bandwagon".

Brown confirmed in an interview in Black Echoes that he had parted company with Holness, stating: "I was going along with one man's ideas for too long. Niney was trying to find a new beat at all times, which was disconcerting, so I hadn't been working with my true abilities. Now I know that I can produce myself."

Brown recommenced working with Joe Gibbs, with an agreement that, in return for studio time for his own productions, Brown would allow Gibbs the use of any rhythm recorded in the process.

The first album from this arrangement, the 1977 release Visions of Dennis Brown, gave him his biggest success up to that point, blending conscious themes and love songs, and confirming Brown's transformation from child star to grown-up artist.

The biblical-themed sleeve and portrait of Haile Selassie on the jacket back complemented the roots reggae tracks on the album, including "Repatriation", "Jah Can Do it", and cover versions of Earl 16's "Malcolm X" and Clive Hunt's "Milk and Honey".