“The music was in Jamaica playing, but no one knew really what to call it,” Hibbert told a reporter from Vogue just last month. Hibbert — who died in Kingston on Friday at 77 — grew up in the Jamaican countryside, raised by Seventh-day Adventist preachers, but moved to Kingston as a teenager, where he would eventually channel the supple elegance of the hymns he learned in church into a new Black music that spoke for Jamaica’s underclass. His voice could be a rough and graceful thing, and it helped the Maytals’s songs about struggle and uplift resonate across the country and beyond. ADADHibbert’s voice spread across the planet in 1975 when two Toots and the Maytals albums — 1973’s “Funky Kingston” and 1974’s “In the Dark” — were cut-and-pasted into a new disc, also titled “Funky Kingston,” that featured some of the group’s most potent moments: the uncompromising optimism of “Time Tough,” the hard-earned catharsis of “Pressure Drop,” and, of course, “Funky Kingston,” a song that still feels as hot, bright and alive as sunrise in July. From verse to chorus, Hibbert aptly positions himself as reggae’s planetary emissary: “Music is what I’ve got to give, and I’ve got to find some way to make it … Funky Kingston is what I’ve got for you.”

Source: Washington Post September 12, 2020 18:11 UTC