Derrick Harriott: Skinheadism

An UndertakingIn continuing the discussion that I'm having with myself about skinheadism and reggae, ska and or rock steady, a mention of Derrick Harriott and the Crystalites is more than needed Again, while the contrived genre of skinhead reggae does have its own pretendo trappings, it's all really just a part of the larger swath of JA music. At no time - on the island at least, England was another story - were these folks devising tunes for baldies. Maybe rude boys - the JA equivalent to the latter British bred cultural phenomenon - but that's about it.

Harriott, though, was as early a contributor to the JA music scene as any other. Beginning prior to the island's independence, the singer had cut a few singles with notable producers and on the strength of his organizational talents, began heading sessions and directing musicians.

The band of players that he's most oft associated with, though, is the Crystalites. And even a quick listen to anything that the group recorded under the auspices of Harriott's name will conjure some tunes from early Lee Perry efforts like The Return of Django. And for good reason. The first batch of Upsetters eventually moved on to become Harriott's band, thusly accounting for the musical similarities.

But again, those musical similarities might add up to what folks refer to as skinhead reggae. Defining that point between ska and reggae is needlessly difficult. And it doesn't really matter, instead take in those simplistic chord changes and rave ups. Harriott, though, may have given the record geek world the best example of this in-between time with his release of 1970's The Undertaker.

In the almost forty years since its release, the album has obviously become rather hard to track down. The Jamaican Gold imprint, though, re-released a version of the disc with an expanded track listing a few years back entitled A Fistful of Dollars due to the albums spaghetti western feel - check those spoken word ditties at the head of the title track and it's companion piece "The Overtaker."

This filmic influence, though, further works to bring together the work of Perry and Harriott. The aforementioned Perry disc even sports a dude riding a horse on its cover. This confusing cowboy obsession serves to unify Harriott's instrumental disc with a few sporadic vocal snippets.

But the cowboy inflections aren't the only reason to cop this disc. Melodically, "Biafra" is almost "Norwegian Wood" - and it might even surpass the Bunny Wailer version of the Beatles track. But where as that song comes from some cultural other, the rest of The Undertaker is purely Jamaican in all of its musical flair.

The tremolo of the guitar on "The Bad" should have given listeners from the '70s ample warning of the shift to dub in a few years - Harriott was apparently one of the first producers to utilize King Tubby and his studio on a regular basis. But regardless of where the album was set to tape, it seems as if it's become an ignored classic from a time in JA music's history that hasn't been properly cultivated as of yet.