Dancehall music or art form has been a part of our culture since the 1950s. The DJ unorthodox vocal style emerged during the Sound System Era in which the rulers like Duke Reid and Clement “Sir Coxsone” Dodd and a young King Stitch used the microphone and a distinctive swagger to stamp their ownership on their latest singles and battle for first out of the lane over their rivals.

Duke would DJ while his record was playing, shouting: “Wake it up, wake it up,” and “jump shake a leg”, swaying the downtown patrons from the inner-city beer gardens into his dancehall while the sound blared out the latest rhythm and blues (R&B) offerings of Lloyd Price, Louis Jordan, and Fats Domino.

R&B was the music of the 50s, imported into Jamaica by the systems men, and heard the powerful Miami radio station WINZ, and later on the new local radio station, RJR, that had just birthed in 1950.

The popular slang talk of Duke and Sir Coxsone couldn’t find play on the local airwaves, and so the more sedate radio audience, armed with their transistors or Phillips and Mullard radio sets, were kept entertained with USA rock and roll, Glen Miler big band music, and the soothing voices of Nat King Cole, Ella Fitzgerald, Bing Crosbie, and Sarah Vaughn.

As our music culture evolved, the dancehall was still kept subdued behind the curtains as my generation grew up with the Platters, The Drifters, Ben E King, Nancy Wilson, and The Manhattans.

Then in the early 1960s, as the music of Radio WINZ gave way to the Jamaican ska, rocksteady and reggae, we got glimpses of the underground dancehall and DJ artistes spinning into the ring with Roy Richards, Derrick Morgan, Higgs and Wilson, the Skatalites, and Toots moving closer to centre stage and finding airplay at last on the JBC’ s Teenage Dance Party and the Jamaica Hit Parade.

It was in the 80s that dancehall finally captured mainstream and, since then, according to the purists like myself, it’s been a downhill ride for music, but not all the way.

In my case, I am a firm, older-generation man, but I will acknowledge the powerful spell cast on the new generations as dancehall music became the message and symbol that reflects the aspirations, realities, and achievements particularly of Jamaicans from the inner cities, while experiencing local and worldwide mainstream success.

Where we part company is with the onslaught of filthy lyrics and gun culture, and the sexual gyrations in front of children that often accompanies it and is encouraged by the DJs. To my mind, such is unforgivable for its brazen attack on morals, values, and attitudes. So I have no apologies for harking back to a story on dancing cheek to cheek vs dancing with the other cheeks so popular nowadays.

My wife and myself shared much of the good lyrics and teenage ‘steppin’ as we enjoyed the best of the reggae that the 60s and 70s produced. Our Christian faith was never compromised and, while I was not the best, I gave my contemporaries a run for their money with the twist, the mash potatoes, and the hully gully.

From a column I wrote in 2017, here is my take on the debate now raging over dancehall vs social dancing:

The art of dancing cheek to cheek went out with the advent of dancehall music in the mid-1980s. It’s truly a generation thing because, while the older ones among us will still do a ballroom twirl, the young and the middle-aged of today’s generation have confined themselves to a ritualistic form of gymnastics that rules out any form of the intimate, up-close swaying that once graced the house party, the nightclubs, and the dance floors of yesteryear.

Dancehall is oddly named, as it appears to me that the dominant theme of feel-good and dependency on loud music and fast rhythms have completely swamped the original concept of two people dancing together. Mark you, dancehall energises street parties and stage shows with moves like ‘gully creeper’, ‘pon de river’, ‘one drop’, ‘Willie bounce’ and ‘Bogle’, and I probably risk dating myself when I include the “wacky drop” as the latest craze. Nevertheless, these dance moves do not constitute dancing in its original form in which couples move together to the rhythm of the music.

I once stopped in Linstead on my way out of Kingston travelling to the north coast and decided to observe for myself what was taking place behind a zinc fence that had advertised a big dance. After all, it was a Friday night, and I wanted to see whether people were still dancing at a dance, or if they simply stood up solo and admired themselves.

Well, dancing solo, or standing solo, was exactly what was going on, as the young men had bundled up themselves in a corner, beer or cigarette in hand, nodding their heads to the boom-boom beat, paying attention only to themselves and completely ignoring the opposite sex on the other side of the room.

The girls were no better. Perhaps they had given up any hope of being asked for a dance, for they themselves had gathered in a little heap on the other side of the hall, discussing the boys, and daring them to come with an invitation to “’mash it up together.

This was a learning experience for me. Whatever I was hoping to recapture had gone the way of all flesh. I was yearning to catch a glimpse of the old days of house parties at Mona Heights and Harbour View when teenagers were allowed by parents and guardians to have their version of a coming-out party. That was not to be.

My earliest recollection of social dancing came from peeping into my village schoolroom at the antics of the elder folks celebrating a lodge banquet, a harvest supper, or a cricket team fund-raising party.

The orchestra came from Kingston in the form of five or six men dressed in black suits, long faces, and strumming a bass guitar taller than the tallest man, accompanied by a drummer (not a drum set), a piano, and if we were lucky, a real saxophone or trumpet for the brass section.

They were serious about their business and would brook no distraction from the tiny tots like myself who tried to get them to allow us a blow off the horn or a beat on the drums. The only time the group smiled was when the curry goat was served and they retired for their break.

These village dances were to later boast a gramophone and amplifier set for the dance music as fingers snapped to Louis Prima’s Green Door and the elders got on their feet for the mambo, the Bebop, a fast foxtrot, and the late-hour waltzes. And no matter how many miles per hour they were going, couples danced together.

As youngsters, we were taught how to approach the ladies: “May I have this dance with you?” being the standard set, and the ladies would demurely decline at first, then give the invitation their kind consideration before hastily accepting in case you moved on and spoilt their chance to tally up their dance card.

Now, get it straight. Ladies in those days never asked men to dance. Later on, at boarding school, we boys looked forward eagerly to the twice per year Munro-Hampton hop held in the dining room, enjoying dancing with the opposite sex who were normally kept out of sight and out of reach. But even as we danced to our hearts’ content, we were still guided by the courtesy of “May I have this dance?” and were supervised under the eagle eyes of principals Richard Roper and Gloria Wesley-Gammon, who took their seats on the platform and remained there until the last dance and the final goodbyes.

Dancing means a lot to those of us who have come up through the periods of the big band music, the rock and roll, the ska, and the rocksteady, and reggae tempos that preceded the dancehall era.

Ella Fitzgerald will always make you want to glide around the dance floor as she “seems to find the happiness I seek, when we’re out together dancing cheek to cheek”.

I may be called an old fogey, but I will always insist that social dancing is a two-way street for male and female couples to meet and move together to the rhythm of the music, which, if true love is involved, becomes a dance to their own heartbeat. This is in direct contradiction to the dancehall gyrations which keep the sexes physically apart.

So, if only for a moment we go back sometimes to the music of the 1950s, which was a command performance to let the music play, just a little longer, while we danced all night.

And the assurance from my own Lusta Rose that, in spite of the dancehall din and the night noises and the clash of the sound systems, she will always save the last dance for me.

Lance Neita is a writer and public relations consultant. Send comments to the Jamaica Observer or to lanceneita@hotmail.com.