Jerome Hines

Jerome Hines (Jah Jerry), guitarist and songwriter: born 1927; died Kingston, Jamaica 13 August 2007.

The Jamaican musician Jerome Hines – "Jah Jerry" – helped create the sound of ska, as guitarist with the Skatalites and studio accompanist to Prince Buster, Derrick Morgan, Desmond Dekker, Bob Marley and the Wailers, Toots and the Maytals and Millie Small. His distinctive, syncopated guitar playing, combining elements of mento, calypso and jazz, featured on hundreds of recordings. Ska's popularity has proved enduring, first with mods and skinheads in the UK, subsequently with the 2-Tone bands the Specials, Madness, the Beat and the Selecter, and again from the late Eighties with the American ska-core groups Fishbone, Mighty Mighty Bosstones, No Doubt and Less Than Jake. Ska also paved the way for rock steady and reggae.

Hines was a late starter and picked up the guitar from his blind father when he was 22. He had some tuition from Ernest Ranglin, who was already playing around the Jamaican capital, Kingston. Later, Ranglin recommended Hines for various gigs and played alongside him in Prince Buster's All Stars. Hines eventually made his recording début with the Drumbago All Stars at Federal Studios. He cut an instrumental track called "Count Boysie Special" for the Count Boysie sound system and participated in many sessions for the producer and singer Prince Buster.

Most famously, Hines played on "They Got to Go" and "Shake a Leg" by the singer Derrick Morgan, the singles on which rhythm'*'blues, jazz, mento, calypso, shuffle and boogie coalesced into ska. "That style of guitar, Prince Buster say, was the way gears change on a car, and I play the guitar like a man driving an automatic car," Hines explained. "All the other guitarists never play it like me." Hines was in at the birth of ska not only with Buster and Morgan, but through his work for producers such as Duke Reid, Clement "Coxsone" Dodd, Lyndon Pottinger, J.J. Johnson and King Edwards. "Because in those days the money was small, you have to play for everybody," he said. He would receive 10 Jamaican dollars per session and no royalties.

Hines joined an embryonic line-up of the Skatalites in the spring of 1964. "Only Roland Alphonso [alto saxophone] and Johnny Moore [trumpet] came before me," he recalled. Although the seminal group lasted only about 15 months and often drafted in other Jamaican musicians for live appearances and sessions, the Skatalites had a prodigious recorded output, backing Stranger Cole, Tony Gregory, Lord Creator, Lord Tanamo, Jackie Opel, Doreen Schaeffer and Delroy Wilson.

They also issued singles under their own name and those of their featured soloists and made the UK charts in 1967 with an infectious version of "Guns of Navarone", which was covered by the Special A.K.A. on their live EP Too Much Too Young in 1980. Subsequently gathered on countless compilations, the Skatalites' repertoire ranged from unacknowledged adaptations of film themes like "Exodus" or "The Third Man", Beatles' songs and original compositions like "Confucius" and "Eastern Standard Time". They broke up in August 1965 after their trombonist Don Drummond was jailed for the murder of his girlfriend – he died in a mental asylum in 1969 – but the other musicians remained active well into the Seventies.

Hines joined the reunited Skatalites and appeared at the Jamaica Sunsplash festival in 1983 and its UK offshoot two years later, but he'd always been a reluctant live performer and later declined to travel outside Jamaica.

Pierre Perrone