The Jamaica Observer’s Entertainment Desk continues with the seventh of its biweekly feature looking at seminal moments that have helped shape Jamaica over the past 60 years.

AT the start of 1965, ska was still the rage in Jamaica. Late that year, a new sound emerged during a recording session at Federal Records in Kingston.

It involved singer Hopeton Lewis and The Jets, a band led by Trinidadian guitarist Lynn Taitt.

The song they worked on that day was Take it Easy, which was more laid-back than the frenetic, jazz-based ska. It marked the birth of rocksteady.

Taitt, who came to Jamaica three years earlier to help celebrate the country’s Independence from Britain, guided the session which also included Gladstone Anderson on keyboards.

“When I went to Jamaica and started playing with Baba Brooks and those guys, everything was fast, but in Trinidad they had fast calypso and slow calypso,” Taitt said in a 2003 interview with the Jamaica Observer. “So that day I told Gladdy (keyboardist Gladstone Anderson) to slow the tempo and that’s how Take It Easy and rocksteady came about. Rocksteady is really slow ska.”

Musicologists generally agree that rocksteady lasted three years before giving way to reggae. That period saw the emergence of a new breed of musician, songwriter and a flood of singers and harmony groups.

Taitt was the most prolific of the musicians. He played on some of the era’s biggest hits, including Israelites and (007) Shanty Town (Desmond Dekker and The Aces), Stop That Train (Keith And Tex), Girl I’ve Got A Date (Alton Ellis), and You Have Caught Me by The Melodians.

In addition to Taitt and Anderson, musicians who made their mark on rocksteady included: saxophonists Tommy McCook, Headley Bennett and Cedric Brooks, trumpeter Bobby Ellis, guitarists Hux Brown and Eric Frater, bassists Boris Gardiner, Jackie Jackson and Leroy Sibbles, drummers Fil Callender, Joe Isaacs, Winston Grennan and Lloyd Adams, keyboardists Jackie Mittoo, Winston Wright, Aubrey Adams and Richard Ace.

Some of the genre’s leading singers began recording pre-ska. Heading that list was the soulful Ellis whose songs like I’m Still in Love, I’m Just A Guy, and Let Him Try are standards of Jamaican pop music.

Other prominent rocksteady singers were Delroy Wilson, Slim Smith, Ken Boothe and Bob Andy. The harmony groups included The Heptones, The Melodians, The Paragons and The Techniques.

Like ska, Studio One and Treasure Isle were the leading producers of rocksteady. The camps were led by Clement “Coxson” Dodd and Arthur “Duke” Reid, respectively.

Bob Andy, a founding member of The Paragons, redefined the songwriter while at Studio One. His songs, such as Too Experienced, I’ve Got to Back Home, and Unchained, influenced the Jamaican artiste to compose their own songs.

The rocksteady period inspired roots-reggae musicians at Channel One during the 1970s. That studio’s house band, The Revolutionaries, revised some of Dodd and Reid’s sounds with great success.

Rocksteady was the driving force behind Stur Gav sound system coming to prominence in the 1980s with deejays Charlie Chaplin and Josey Wales. Those beats also made classic songs for producer Henry “Junjo” Lawes’ Volcano label that decade.

Duke Reid died in 1975 at age 59. Dodd passed away in 2004, aged 72.

Nerlynn “Lynn” Taitt, mastermind behind rocksteady, died in Montreal, Canada, in January 2010 at age 75.