Attempting to distill an entire genre, though a small one to be sure, through the work of a single player seems ludicrous. It is. Locating the precise impetus for a movement is equally difficult, though, we may search it out. Floundering for answers, there’s usually a person that all of this falls on for no other reason apart from the fact that it kinda works. That’s all problematic in and of itself, but what’s even more frustrating is doing all of this within a genre that’s largely ignored.

Jamaican music obviously has its benefactors, fans and players spread out across the globe. But the general ignorance about how the island’s music progressed is part of the problem. No one rightly knows what rock steady is. There’ve been compilations attempting to cobble sort out a history that folks might accept. But more likely than not, the players on those tracks, when each was being recorded, had no intention of working within a genre construct like that.

Regardless of that, Lynn Taitt is generally pegged as being the guitarist to signal the shift from ska to rock steady, allowing for the future possibility of reggae as was developed in his wake. Taitt, who passed away this last January, finds his name affixed to a number of tracks that genre aficionados count as rock steady’s first recording. With Derrick Morgan and “Tougher than Tough,” Alton Ellis and “Girl I've Got a Date” as well as Hopeton Lewis’  "Take It Easy" Taitt was on guitar. Commonly, that trifecta of song craft is described as the beginning of a shift that would move from ska to reggae.

Rock steady’s a stop over point by all accounts. It may have given the island some of its most magnificent peaks even when considering the short duration that the genre existed in JA. But Taitt’s torrential recording schedule allowed for a wide array of approaches to the (pseudo) genre to be captured.

Recently a few proper compilations have cropped up, including a double disc affair. And while those sanctioned releases are more consistent when if comes to quality, a bootleg clutch of tracks hit the internets – and has since disappeared. What it included, though, was thirty plus tracks of that trembling sound that folks have come to associate with rock steady guitar playing.

Supposedly, Taitt, who grew up in Trinidad and worked in some steel drum bands before relocating to JA, sought to capture the sound of his percussion instrument on guitar. There’s no way that anyone would have guessed at that particular explanation, so it may well be true.

It doesn’t really matter, whatever the reason, because Taitt and the various groups he worked in, including the Jets and Baba Brooks’ ensemble amongst others, was able to record so frequently that there’s a pretty decent representation of JA music’s slowly changing form. To the uninitiated, none of this matters and most likely the aural differences would be obscured by coming off as world music. But there’s something to this mess of singles thrown together for the purposes of spreading the gospel. It’s just something that only a few folks care to find out about.