News of serious crimes in Jamaica kept Nathaniel “Jerry Maytal” Mathias away from the north Caribbean island for a long time after he immigrated to the United States of America.

Mathias turned 88 on Saturday and is the only living member of the original Maytals Reggae group, which also included Frederick “Toots” Hibbert and Henry “Raleigh” Gordon.

Mathias emigrated to the US 43 years ago to live with his wife Hermine after The Maytals split up officially, due “to outside interference,” according to him. He never set foot back in Jamaica until last week, after he finally gave in to nagging from his longtime friend, Earl “Fanny” Powell, who pressured him to come home.

“Earl made me feel sick sometimes to how he’s been trying to get me to come home. Him seh, ‘Jerry, you don’t know what you are missing.’ The area I come from, Maxfield Avenue, nobody there will remember me now. With the kind of youth we have these days, I was just afraid, man. Earl said, ‘You affi come man. You see the first time you go down deh, a bet you going want to come back.’ It was earlier today I lay down in the bed and I said to my wife that maybe next year we have to come back,” he said, sparking laughter during an interview with journalists on Thursday afternoon.

According to Powell, he has been trying to drive the fear out of Mathias, trying to explain to him that despite the high crime in many parts of the island he could still be safe.

“When he says he is scared, I say, ‘Watch yah, man, don’t say those things,’ ” Powell shared.

Just weeks before Mathias’s return to Jamaica, US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen vacationed in Montego Bay. That was just days before the US State Department issued a travel advisory urging Americans against travel to the island due to crime.

In the advisory that was updated on May 10, the State Department said US Government personnel are prohibited from travelling to many areas due to increased risk. It said that violent crimes, such as home invasions, armed robberies, sexual assaults, and homicides, were common and that sexual assaults occur frequently, including at all-inclusive resorts.

The State Department also claimed that Jamaican police often do not respond effectively to serious criminal incidents.

Despite all that, Mathias said he was elated to be able to celebrate his 88th birthday in Jamaica.

Reminiscing on the glory days, when the original Maytals was active, Mathias shared how the group started. He said he met Toots one day while trying to ease frustration after numerous record producers weren’t giving him a chance in the music business.

“In 1962 I loved music and always made up songs. I used to go by the promoters — like Coxsone Dodd, Duke Reid, Prince Buster, King Edwards and those people, to try and see if I could get into the recording business. I loved it, but I wasn’t getting anywhere. I used to smoke herb and I went to a place where they sold herb. While I was there, I saw this guy come up to me with a little guitar. I said, ‘Yow man, you’d like to play that thing?’ He said, ‘No man, I can play it, man.’ He played a song and I thought the guy was dynamic. I sang one of my songs to him and he said, “Oh my God, you’re dangerous.” I told him that I love this music thing and wanted to get into the recording business. I went to all these producers and they just turned me down. They told me things like, ‘I will get in touch with you, don’t worry. Everything is alright,’ but nobody never turned up for me. Toots said it was the same thing that was happening to him.”

Mathias said he told Toots that they could meet up and rehearse to see if people would accept them.

According to him, Toots said, “No problem.”

“About the third evening after we started rehearsing, Toots came to me and said he just met a brother outside and he said, ‘Him good, boy, him good.’ I told him to bring him in. The following evening he brought in Raleigh, who became the third member. We started rehearsing together from then on. We were just three men. There was no name.

“We rehearsed and people started to hear the sound coming from us and started to get interested. People around started looking over fence and it was just excitement. From there, we didn’t have to go and look support from promoters or producers. After carrying on for a while, dancehall people came to us and said to come by the dance. They said we could raise money and things like that and help them build their name too. We carried on like that for a while.

“About six months after we met, a man came to us and said Coxsone Dodd said he heard about us and would like to meet with us. We went by Dodd and he said he wanted to hear what we had. He claimed that he liked the sound, but he was kind of not sure about Toots because he said Toots sounded like a country and western singer. He gave us a try and set up a date for studio and we went into the studio and did four songs for him that day. After the first session he started to release the songs and he told us we sounded good.”

Mathias said after that the group went to studio every other three to four weeks and did three to four songs each time. He said Dodd gave them “a little money and it continued until he said he was going to give us royalty on the songs, but the record wouldn’t sell worldwide, just in the Caribbean”.

The group continued to work with Dodd, according to Mathias, although they still didn’t have a name.

The three members of the group sat down one day and the name Maytals manifested. The Maytals, with their hit single Bam Bam, won the first-ever Festival Song Competition. The Maytals won the competition again in 1969 with Sweet and Dandy and 1972 with Pomps and Pride.

“The name came up because we smoked herb continually. We would mix the herb with cigarette or cigar, but Raleigh smoked it maytal, the herb by itself. The name came up just like that. One of us said we are Maytals and we continued as the Maytals. In 1962, a guy who used to work with the Government came to us and said they were doing some festival songs and if we want to enter in it, we can do so. We wrote the song Bam Bam and recorded it. All three of us wrote that song.

“Majority of the songs, Toots would come up with the topic, but three of us sat down and worked out the words and the harmony. We didn’t know what Bam Bam was going to be until it hit the streets. Everybody in the streets was singing Bam Bam. After a time I was not so active in the group like I was before. For a good while we hadn’t made any hit records and we weren’t getting any good feedback, and not much money was coming in. I got married and my wife went to foreign. Those times we were living off live performances and we weren’t making much.

“I started living in the US by that time. I would come home, rehearse, record, and travel for a few years. Things weren’t improving and nothing was going on. I said it was not suiting my cause. I was really looking for a future because I had a family. I said I had to move away and find myself somewhere I could try to make a better life. I decided to go to the US, reside there, and get a job. Toots went on to a solo career and Rollie wasn’t really doing anything,” he said.