If Bob Marley is reggae's most revered message man, Toots Hibbert is the embodiment of its more essential soul. In performance, he appears possessed by a song's spirit, gliding lazily over his lyrics as if their meaning can be better expressed through sheer physicality than through clarity of enunciation.
Hibbert's partnership with Henry "Raleigh" Gordon and Nathaniel "Jerry" Matthias as the Maytals yielded a hatful of reggae's biggest hits, characterised by the trio's strong harmonising. In Jamaica, the band's stream of chart-topping tracks through the mid-'60s and early '70s under producers Coxsone Dodd, Lesley Kong and Warwick Lyn was interrupted only by Hibbert's spell in jail for marijuana possession (he was framed, he says), and when Island Records boss Chris Blackwell took their music to the UK in 1972, it met an international audience slowly awakening to rock-steady rhythms.
Funky Kingston (1972) is the first of the Blackwell/Lyn productions aimed at the UK market. A later album of the same name was released in the US in 1975, with a revised track listing that cherry-picked songs from the 1972 album and follow-up In The Dark.
The original album might not be as heavily stacked with Maytals hits, but it's a more revealing inventory of the forces that were forging this emerging sound. Rock-steady drew inspiration from the US soul and rhythm and blues acts, and here the Maytals cover Ike and Tina Turner's I Can't Believe and the Kingsmen's Louie Louie, turning the former into a playful chant and the latter into a mesmerising incantation and dance-floor filler.
Redemption Song and It Was Written Down highlight the top-notch, gospel-influenced close-harmony singing of the core trio, while Pomp And Pride is an infectious pop hit.
On the title track, Hibbert approaches a state of shamanic exuberance. His gravelly voice, powerful, soulful and fraying at the edges, is surely one of the finest in reggae or rock.
