Date: 1996 (release)
Release: Island #524219
Cover Art: view / download
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“Reggae means comin’ from d’people, you know. Everyday ting, like from the ghetto. Majority beat. Regular beat that people use like food down there. We put music to it, make a dance out of it. I would say that reggae means comin’ from the roots, ghetto music. Means poverty, suffering, and, in the end, maybe union with God if you do it right.”
– Fred “Toots” Hibbert, interviewed by Stephen Davis, The New York Times
While Bob Marley & The Wailers have now come to symbolize reggae, Toots & The Maytals were equally important figures in the evolution of Jamaican music, from ska, through rock steady, and into reggae. Formed in Kingston during the ska wave of the early ’60s, the Maytals were comprised of Toots, Nathaniel “Jerry” Mathias and Raleigh Gordon. A favorite singer of Bob Marley and Peter Tosh, Toots is not only one of reggae’s most glorious founding fathers, he is widely credited with giving the genre its name with his 1968 hit, “Do The Reggay.”
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