Hit put Jamaican music in spotlight
Singer
WITH international sales of five million copies in 1964, hit single
My Boy Lollipop, sung by Millie, “opened the door for Jamaican music to the world”, producer Chris Blackwell said.
Millie died on May 5, aged 72. Blackwell had flown the 16yearold from Kingston to London to manage her career. Millie’s shrill, joyful vocals, married to a galloping ska rhythm in Olympic Studios in London in an arrangement by the Jamaican master guitarist Ernest Ranglin, were beamed out all that summer from the new pirate radio stations that were instrumental in helping promote the record.
In May 1964, two months after the release of My Boy Lollipop,
Millie was given a guest appearance on the ITV special
Around the Beatles.
In both the UK and the US, My Boy Lollipop was a No 2 hit, kept off the top slot respectively by the Searchers and the Beach Boys. In America, Millie rode the slipstream of the British Invasion started by the Beatles six months earlier; in New York she stepped off a plane — dubbed the ‘‘Lollipop Special’’ by a clever publicist — from the UK to a 30strong police guard; fans screamed as she was presented with what was said to be the world’s largest lollipop.
By then a fouryear veteran of the Jamaican music business, and trained to be an utter professional, Millie rose to her sudden brief superstardom with graceful aplomb.
“It was just incredible how she handled it,” Blackwell said.
“She was such a sweet person: very funny, great sense of humour. She was really special.”
Originally released in 1956 in the US by Barbie Gaye as a shuffle blues, Lollipop had been a small hit. The tune’s songwriter, however, was a card player who had swapped his rights to it for a $100 bet that he lost. Morris Levy, a New York record boss, contacted the betwinner and took over the rights to the song, thereby owning the publishing income from this future multimillionseller.
Millicent Dolly May Small — known professionally as Millie — was born in Clarendon in south central Jamaica on October 6, 1947. Her father was a poorly paid sugar plantation overseer, and she had seven brothers and five sisters.
At the age of 12, she won the 30shilling second prize at the Vere Johns talent show, a route to stardom for many Jamaican acts, by singing and dancing a routine she used to amuse her family.
After the talent show, she moved to Love Lane in Kingston to live with an aunt, and early in 1962 she auditioned for Clement “Coxsone” Dodd, the sound system operator whose Studio One label had become an influential force in Jamaica. Impressed by her vocal similarity to Shirley Goodman of the US R&B duo Shirley and Lee, Dodd placed Millie under the wing of Owen Gray, an established hit singer on his label.
After working on her vocal technique, Gray recorded a number of duets with Millie, in the Shirley and Lee mode, including Sugar Plum, a big Jamaican hit. Millie was then put together with Roy Panton, another aspiring local singer. In the spring of 1962, their tune We’ll Meet was a substantial Jamaican hit, the first of a string of successes for Roy and Millie. — Guardian News & Media