UNSUNG: Mento man Stanley Beckford
In a country where dancehall and reggae are dominant, Stanley Beckford single-handedly kept mento music on the front burner of Jamaica’s popular culture.
The singer’s breakthrough song came in 1975 with the risqué Soldering, which was banned from Jamaican airwaves. Interestingly, that song was covered by an emerging American duo named Hall and Oates for their 1975 album Daryl Hall & John Oates.
It was co-written by Beckford and Alvin Ranglin, who produced several of Gregory Isaacs’s hits, including Love Is Overdue and Border. Beckford was backed on Soldering by the Soul Syndicate, one of the top bands in reggae.
Broom Weed and Leave my Kisiloo were other radio-friendly Stanley Beckford songs that became favourites outside Festival. Along with Soldering, they are on the 2002 album Stanley Beckford Plays Mento.
Beckford, with his distinctive, high-pitched voice, was a staple at the Festival Song Competition, which he won four times — twice with The Turbines, once with The Astronauts, and solo. Those songs were Come Sing with Me (1980), Dem a fi Squirm (1986), Dem a Pollute (1994), and Fi Wi Island a Boom, which won in 2000.
Born in Portland, Beckford’s career started as a rocksteady/reggae artiste in the late 1960s, but he switched to mento in the early 1970s and began playing for tourists in north coast hotels.
Up until his death on March 30, 2007 at 65, Beckford kept the flames of mento burning.
In April 2007 American author David Katz wrote a comprehensive obituary saluting Beckford’s understated legacy for Britain’s The Guardian newspaper.
“In 2001, while playing hotel performances with the Fab 5 band, he was asked by French record executives to record an album of old-time mento for the European market. On Stanley Beckford Plays Mento, released by Barclay, Beckford was backed by the Blue Glaze band, one of the island’s top mento groups, with additional harmony provided by his wife Thelma and daughter Monique. The album and European tours gave Beckford a new audience. In France he was compared to [Cuban guitarist] Compay Segundo of the Buena Vista Social Club and his success there led to the 2004 follow-up Reggaemento released by Warners.” Proof that Stanley Beckford was much more than a Festival and mento singer.
