When Orville ‘Shaggy’ Burrell signed his first one million pound recording contract, of course it blew his mind! To grasp the full magnitude of this surreal moment, one must retrace time to 1968 Rae Town, the teeming Kingston ghetto.

Shaggy’s parents, Lorraine Veronica Dewar and Clifton Burrell, were living in a tenement yard at Charlotte Street, Rae Town, when he was born at the University Hospital of the West Indies in 1968. He attended Duhaney Park Primary School and later Edith Dalton James Secondary.

At age 16, Shaggy joined his motherm who had migrated to New York, USA and attended the Erasmus Hall Academy in Flatbush, Brooklyn. His first big attraction was music and he adopted the style of his hero, DJ King Yellowman.

In 1986, he got what would be his first big break through promoter Paul ‘Rossy’ Lee, owner of the Gibraltar sound system for which won his first dance hall clash against a sound system called Aquarius.

When two of his close friends got involved in a shooting incident, in which two men were killed, Shaggy thought that could have been his fate and the next day he enlisted with the US Marines based at Paris Island, South Carolina, and after training spent four years at Camp LeJeune in North Carolina.

He was deployed in the first Gulf War when Iraq invaded Kuwait, spending seven months in the Saudi Arabian desert and received an honourable discharge in 1991, taking up where he had left off with his music and recording.

His first two big hits were Mampy and Big Up Big Up which launched him in New York as a ghetto superstar at age 24. He was then invited to tour Brazil and Canada with Maxi Priest, earning US$500 a week.

He shortly after produced his first international hit, Carolina on the independent label, Signet licensed to Green Sleeves, and was signed by Virgin Records for an eye-popping One Million pounds.

Then came the fantastic Mr Bombastic which went viral when Levi Jeans featured it in their commercial. The Bombastic album won the Grammy Award in 1996. Sometime after, he was called by Michael Jackson’s producer, Terry Lewis, to do a song for the soundtrack of the movie How Stella Got Her Groove Back. Shaggy’s song, Love Me Love Me featured Janet Jackson and became a hit single, selling platinum.

His next big signing was with MCA Records which produced the Hot Shot album with the mega hits It wasn’t me and Angel. It was the first reggae dancehall album to sell diamond after Bob Marley’s Legend. After the gig with MCA, he signed with Universal’s Geffen label.

In 2007, he was again nominated for a Grammy for the single Fight the feeling with Beres Hammond. Seven years later he signed a major three-album deal with Sony.

As Shaggy’s success grew over the years, he felt a need to give back to the land of his birth. In 1998 he made a visit to the Bustamante Hospital for Children where staff told him heartbreaking stories about the shortages of vital equipment that could save lives at the hospital. He started the Shaggy Make a Difference Foundation on a suggestion from William Mahfood and promoted the highly successful Shaggy and Friends concert series that has raised US$2 million for the hospital since 2009.

In recognition of his outstanding contribution to the Jamaican music industry and his charitable work, Shaggy was honoured with the national honour of the Order of Distinction (Commander Class). The loves of his life are his wife, Rebecca, and five children.