Most reggae artists sport dreads. Toots Hibbert wears his hair short and nappy – a "baldhead," in rasta parlance. Most reggae acts perform with a stoned somnambulism, swaying dreamily with sleepy eyes. Toots bounds about the stage, his compact frame dancing, a radiant smile on his face.
"My show is generated from the people," Hibbert says during a brief cell phone interview while he's darting around Jamaica preparing to embark on his American tour. "I cannot do it without the people; people appreciate it, then I give them more. I grew up in the church too, so there's gospel in what I do. The music is more special when it's moving."
Although he was raised Baptist in the Jamaican countryside, Toots says, "I am Rasta. But I don't carry natty dreads. You don't have to have dreads to be Rasta; it's not part of the doctrine. To be Rasta is to be upright, to be good to people, to not be prejudiced, to be clean in anything you do."
Even so, being a baldhead must've pegged him as an outsider to some extent. Why no dreadlocks? "Christ no wear dreads," he says. "Our Lord God, he not dread. I want to be like him."
Although Toots does not approach the deity status of the late Bob Marley, and his international career never matched that of Peter Tosh or Jimmy Cliff, he is arguably (I would certainly argue) the greatest singer in reggae annals. His voice rumbles upward from his chest, tramples through the sandpaper in his throat and comes out a magnificent, raspy soul shout. It has the same overpowering effect as that of the late Ray Charles.
"I listened to Ray," Toots says when asked if Charles was an influence. "Some people also say I sound like Otis Redding. I like to think I sound like myself, but it is good being compared to good people."
It's no accident that one of Toots' most beloved tunes is titled "Reggae Got Soul," and that one of his most critically lauded efforts was the late '80s album Toots in Memphis, where he reggae-fied a cache of Southern R&B tunes. Over his storied career, Toots has carved out a musical niche that's political without being overtly so; spiritual without being tethered to Rasta dogma. More than anything, it's music of celebration, be it surviving hard knocks or dancing 'til you can no longer stand.
There's not a whit of sonic evidence that, at 58, Toots Hibbert is slowing down. The unbridled force of his singing is on full display in last year's Toots and the Maytals CD True Love (V2), which finds the reggae legend locking mics with a far-reaching array of luminaries – Willie Nelson, Bonnie Raitt, Keith Richards and Ryan Adams among them. The collection, comprised mostly of remakes from Toots' catalogue, also features instrumental contributions from the likes of Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck and Trey Anastasio. True Love is no mere tribute album, some nostalgic memento where acts join forces with a fading legend to prop him up one last time. If anything, Toots' duet partners have to do their best to keep up.
On "Time Tough," Raitt's laconic bent notes mesh exquisitely with Toots' spirited testifying. The springy ska tune "Monkey Man" finds No Doubt's Gwen Stefani punctuating his brawny vocals with some chirpy accents. Jeff Beck's serpentine guitar lines slither in and around Toots' gruff pleading on "54-46," titled after Hibbert's inmate number when he spent nine months in Jamaican prison on trumped-up pot possession charges.
True Love serves as a career summation – and rebirth. It has sold well internationally, and won this year's Grammy for best reggae album. "It gave the songs new life, new identification," Toots says. "We try to put together Jamaican roots, American roots. I just do it. I never think it takes off like this. It's been very successful. It's something special for me."
When the teenaged Frederick Hibbert came to Kingston from the rural mountains in the early '60s, Jamaican music was still somewhat focused northward to the U.S. But there was a shakeup afoot, and by 1963 the first wave of ska emerged with an indigenous rhythm and budding African consciousness. Studios and producers cropped up in Kingston.
It was during these heady times that Hibbert formed The Maytals with fellow up-and-comers Henry "Raleigh" Gordon and Nathaniel "Jerry" Mathias. In 1966, the group won the first Jamican Festival Song Competition with the Latin-tinged "Bam Bam."
It was around this time that the hyperkinetic ska sound gradually gave way to slower, cooler rocksteady. The African influence became more pronounced and Rastafarianism began to form the music's philosophical basis. After Toots finished his prison stint, he and his mates released a string of records that saw them become one of the best-selling acts in Jamaica. In '72, they took the international stage with an appearance in the landmark film The Harder They Come, contributing two songs to the soundtrack: "Sweet and Dandy" and the socially conscious classic, "Pressure Drop."
It was four years earlier, though, that Toots unwittingly made perhaps his most lasting contribution. In 1968, he and the Maytals put out a single called "Do the Reggay," uniformly regarded as the first time the term was used in a song. Toots has explained it thus:
"People tell me that, but when I did it, I didn't know. There was the beat in Jamaica, reggae was played long before I started singing. And there was a slang, like a nickname for someone who don't dress properly – like if you are barefoot, people would call you 'streggae.' They say 'Hey, that guy is streggae, don't talk to him.' If a girl don't dress properly, like don't have on any top, they call her streggae. So one morning, one Tuesday morning, we just said 'Let's go along and do some reggae.'
"Those days we'd just make stuff up, anything. A bird flies around the corner, you write a song about it. So we just say 'Do the reggay, do the reggay,' and that's it. A few words, y'know? And nobody paid it any mind until it started to go all over the world. I saw it in the Guinness Book of Records. So I thank God that I did something good, and I didn't even plan it."
This article appears in Mar 9-15, 2005.