Toots Hibbert
Jamaican singer and songwriter who helped to make reggae one of the great global musical forces
TOOTS HIBBERT, who has died aged 77 after contracting Covid-19, was the singer with Toots & the Maytals, and one of the great figures of Jamaican music. His 1968 song Do the Reggay was the first chart entry of this new musical form, and the first to name it – even if spelt differently. It went to No 1 in Jamaica, and the Maytals, as they were originally known, had 31 Jamaican charttoppers, more than any other artist, including Bob Marley.
With a voice like a Caribbean Otis Redding, and a phenomenal stage presence, Hibbert was also a multiinstrumentalist. During the 1960s, working first in the ska and rock steady styles, Hibbert’s three-piece vocal group the Maytals, formed with Henry “Raleigh” Gordon and Nathaniel “Jerry” Mathias in 1962, were the biggest act in Jamaica, their sales and popularity eclipsing the Wailers, their main rivals.
Hibbert’s triumphs included being a three-time winner of the annual Jamaica National Popular Song Contest, each time with a self-penned composition: Bam Bam (1966), Sweet and Dandy (1969), and Pomp And Pride (1972).
His impact on modern music and culture was immense: the intuitive assessments of specific examples of Jamaican injustice in his songs had a universal resonance and reach for successive generations.
One example was his 1968 tune Pressure Drop, which became a staple of the Clash’s live sets on the punk band’s first significant tour, in 1977, and was recorded by them in 1979. The Maytals were referenced, along with assorted punk bands, in Bob Marley’s song Punky Reggae Party.
Hibbert’s first international hit, Monkey Man, was included by the Specials on their 1979 debut album. Amy Winehouse also recorded the tune and performed it live. Later, Toots re-recorded the song with the Los Angeles ska-influenced act No Doubt as part of his 2004 Grammywinning duets album True Love.
In 2010 Rolling Stone magazine rated Hibbert as one of the Top 100 all-time great singers. One of his True Love collaborators, Bonnie Raitt, described him as “one of the most powerful and original soul singers ever”, hailing his “gruff, classic style”. Her appreciation was shared by other luminaries on the album, including Eric Clapton, Willie Nelson and Keith Richards.
Pressure Drop and Sweet and Dandy featured in the 1972 Jamaican film The Harder They Come. Signed to Island Records, Toots and the Maytals – as they were renamed with the departure of Gordon and Mathias – produced a string of albums that introduced reggae to a mainstream audience, notably the Funky Kingston and Reggae Got Soul sets, two of the foundation works of Jamaican music. By the first half of the 1970s Toots and the Maytals, along with the Wailers, were the key acts in bringing Jamaican culture to the world. Such success endured despite the 12 months Hibbert spent in prison for marijuana possession, shortly after winning the first National Song Competition with Bam Bam in 1966; he maintained that he had been set up, as he had not yet then started to smoke ganja. He turned his negative experience into something positive: one of his best-known songs, 54-46 That’s My Number – recorded for the celebrated producer Leslie Kong and pre-dating the new sound of reggae – derived from his jail term.
Hibbert’s story was an archetype of the Jamaican diaspora, his tale one that mirrored the sweeping social changes of the years since independence in 1962. Hibbert worked extensively around the world, especially in the United States, Britain, Europe, Australia and Japan.
The youngest of seven children, Frederick Nathaniel Hibbert was born on December 8 1942 in the central Jamaican town of May Pen, where he first sang in church. He moved to Trenchtown in Kingston when he was 13, becoming a barber.
“I make my little four-string guitar and people listen to it in the barber’s shop,” he recalled. “One day Raleigh come down and say, ‘Teach me how to sing.’ I meet Jerry the next day, and we sit under a guinep tree, and everybody just start to sing. I teach them harmony. I teach them how to write song. And they teach me how to grow up.”
In 1961 they became the Maytals – a Rasta word, said Hibbert, meaning “to do the right thing” – recording Rosemarie, one of his first compositions, for King Edwards, a legendary sound system operator.
Almost immediately they moved to work with Coxsone Dodd, whose Studio One label nurtured most of Jamaica’s greatest musicians. They also recorded with Prince Buster, Duke Reid, and Mrs Pottinger, celebrated eminences
grises of the local music scene. “We don’t get no money, really,” recalled Hibbert. “In those days we get a pound or two pounds. Maybe five pounds. And we share it, the three of us. And it go on like that for a long time.”
But it was Do the Reggay, Hibbert said, that moved his work on to an entirely new level: “Everyone who listen to my song after that, they tell me that they feel a different spirit, that I revive their spirit. If they was down, the music just lift them up. So I was really proud of that, and it wasn’t me by myself – it was the power of the most high.
“If I’m doing something I have to do it with a certain spirit, to make sure the Father appreciate it. He give me the talent, really.”
In 2013 he gave up touring for three years after being hit on the head with a vodka bottle during a gig in Virginia. He wrote to the judge at the trial asking for clemency for the perpetrator – “He is a young man, and I have heard what happens to young men in jail” – but a prison sentence was the result.
In August 2020 Toots and the Maytals released a new 10-song album, Got to be Tough, Hibbert’s 24th, and his first studio record in 10 years. That month he was admitted to hospital suffering from Covid-19. Toots Hibbert, who in 2012 was awarded the Order of Jamaica, is survived by his wife and seven of his eight children.
Toots Hibbert, born December 8 1942, died September 11 2020