Chris Blackwell and “My Boy Lollipop”: Ska, Race, and British Popular Music

Abstract

Chris Blackwell and "My Boy Lollipop": Ska, Race and British Popular MusicSka evolved in Jamaica around 1960.I shall talk a little more about its development later.In 1964 there were three hits in the British top ten that utilized a ska beat.On March 14 Millie reached number 2 with "My Boy Lollipop."A week later, the Migil 5's ska version of "Mockin' Bird Hill" reached number 10, its highest position.In December, Georgie Fame and the Blue Flames got to number 1 with the jazz track, "Yeh Yeh," to which they gave a soft ska influence.Discussions of ska, and reggae, have tended to focus on the music's Jamaican origins and have emphasized its qualities as black music.In this article my interest is in the relationship between ska and British popular music of the early 1960s.How did ska enter white Britons' musical consciousness such that, by the late 1960s there were numerous ska hits and, by the late 1970s, there was a ska revival with groups such as Madness and the Two Tone groups including the Specials and Selector having chart hits?To this end I shall concentrate on the most popular of the three 1964 ska hits, Millie's "My Boy Lollipop."This song was first recorded as a rhythm and blues song in New York by Barbie Gaye about whom little is known other than that she was not black.Millie, herself, was a black Jamaican.The track was recorded in London using white, English musicians but it was arranged by the black Jamaican guitarist, Ernest Ranglin, who had been brought over to England for this purpose.The man behind this combination of elements was a Jewish Jamaican entrepreneur named Chris Blackwell.Jews have often been thought of as mediators between cultures.Recently Jonathan Karp has discussed the image in relation to the complex positioning of Jewish composers in Tin Pan Alley in the early part of the twentieth century.He writes that: "The image of Jews as preeminent musical and cultural mediators was rooted in both sociological realities and pervasive stereotypes" (58).Summing up Karp's argument in their Introduction to the collection that contains his chapter, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and Jonathan Karp write that:Arising from the contemporary perception that Jews by nature, as well as (diasporic) historical experience, are the cultural mediators par excellence, Jews were thought to be ideally placed to "straddle multiple worlds: black and white, American and European, high and low" in a manner that cultural critics of the era deemed necessary to the creation of a distinctively American form of music.(18) I am here making no essentialist claims for Jews.Rather, I am arguing that Blackwell's position as an outsider to both white and black Jamaican culture-though the latter more than the former-combined with his colonial positioning, which gave him, in England, an entrée into the social world of the English gentry while keeping him an outsider there also, to place him in an ideal position to bring together the elements that enabled "My Boy Lollipop" to become a major hit.In this way, Blackwell converted his outsider status into an opportunity that we can describe in terms of cultural mediation. Chris Blackwell: Cultural MediatorBlackwell, though, was an outsider even to Jamaican Jews.While his mother was Jewish, his father was Irish.Jason Toynbee describes Chris Blackwell as, "a brilliant rock entrepreneur, a cultural intermediary for the times, with a sure ear for the strange breadth of talent that was emerging in the late sixties and early seventies" (143).He is characteristically identified as a member of Jamaica's white, colonial aristocracy.However, his background is much more complicated than this.Blackwell's father, Joseph Blackwell, was a captain in the Irish Guards.He was a Catholic from County Mayo.As Irish and Catholic he was already an outsider to the English elite.We need to remember that, even in the nineteenth century, the colonized Irish were not considered by the English to be white-for example, Lewis P. Curtis tells us that in 1880 Gustave de Molinari described how English newspapers "allow no occasion to escape them of treating the Irish as an inferior race-as a kind of white negroes [sic]" (1).Right up until the extension of the Race Discrimination Act in 1968, which made discrimination in housing illegal, homes in England that had rooms to rent would often carry signs that had a variation on "No Blacks, No Irish, No Dogs"; the London Irish Catholic, John Lydon (better known as Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols), used a version of the phrase as part of

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