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not your part.” You know, so everybody would try to sing.’

      Cherry remembered a favourite spot of theirs, by Third Street and West Road, where they would sit and sing on the pavement, ‘by the Branch yard. It’s like the JLP. It’s a place, like a yard where they have meetings, and a youth club.’ Singing with the three of them would be ‘Cardo’ – Ricardo Scott, who eventually moved to the USA, where he gained medical and law degrees.

      Unfortunately, Cherry Smith was unavailable for the first Coxsone Dodd sessions, having a regular well-paid seasonal job with Caribbean Preserving, providing money she needed to keep her 3-year-old daughter. Hence she was not available for the photographs of the line-up that featured Bob, Bunny, Peter, and Beverley Kelso. ‘When Junior Braithwaite left, that’s when I took his space,’ she said. Cherry sang on the recordings of ‘Amen’, ‘Lonesome Feelings’, ‘Maga Dog’, and ‘There She Goes’. But she also thought she sang on ‘I am Going Home’ (which both Bunny and Coxsone believed was recorded in the first session).

      Before studio sessions, all concerned paid assiduous attention to mastering their parts in outdoor rehearsals, lit by a kerosene lamp or a fire, or simply the rays of the moon. ‘We rehearse and we rehearse, rehearse, until we know the song. And they would say, “Well, tomorrow we going up to the studio.” So we all get ready, get dressed and we walked with each other, a long walk. It’s nervous: a lot of people there. And we come back late in the night and we have to walk through this burying ground. ’Cause that’s the shortest way.’

      Cherry Smith always felt that it was Junior Braithwaite who owned the finest voice of them all: ‘Oh yes. He carried.’ But as far as she was concerned, her singing excursions were only for fun – ’cause we didn’t get pay for it. We didn’t get nothing. He give us £5 to buy a dress.’ She and Beverley wore identical dresses for the only live show Cherry Smith played with the Wailers, at the Sombrero, shortly after she had recorded the ‘Maga Dog’ tune with Peter Tosh. As time passed at Studio One, however, the two girls would gradually fall away from the group.

      Before the instant popularity of ‘Simmer Down’ had time truly to translate into sales, Bob found himself onstage as lead singer for the first time at that show at the Sombrero Club in Kingston. At the helm of the Wailers, he steered the group to a performance that stole the event, assisted in great part by the crisp and clear sound that Count Machuki, who had started as a DJ with Coxsone’s sound system, obtained for him at the mixing desk. The audience response was overwhelming, but the other artists on the show were vex. Both these acts recorded for Coxsone: did they sense a conspiracy?

      Yet Beverley Kelso did not recall such a success translating into local reverence. ‘Nobody did not bow down to us. Nobody didn’t care who the Wailers was because Higgs and Wilson was already there singing. Hortense was singing, Bunny and Scully, Toots and the Maytals, Delroy Wilson, everybody was right there singing. People gathered to hear us sing but only because they were proud of us: when we would go to the studio people would just wave. The Wailers? It was just like ordinary people, you know.’

      In those days, she said, none of them smoked – neither cigarettes nor herb. On the journey to Studio One, ‘me and Junior is two little short ones, so we would stay in the back, hold each other’s hand and walk and start talking our little talk. Bob would be pushing Bunny, Bunny would be pushing Bob and Peter, and they laugh and they clown and they tease each other. They would laugh at people. The little things that they talk, you just sit down and crack up. I’m telling you, you’d be around them you don’t wanna move. I used to look up on them and they look up on me. With respect. They treat me like a sister and they treat me good.’

      Almost as soon as it was in the shops, ‘Simmer Down’ went to number one in the Jamaican charts. This tune’s subject of teenage crime was notice served that the Wailers were the ambassadors of the island’s rebels, the rude boys. Yet the Wailers were never able to compete with the colossal popularity enjoyed in Jamaica by another three-piece male vocal trio, the Maytals, fronted by Toots Hibbert.

      The subject matter of ‘Simmer Down’ made the Wailers stand out amongst their contemporaries. Up until then no one in Jamaican music had been expressing ghetto thinking. Even the seasoned ska musicians down at Studio One were impressed. ‘The uniqueness of the sound they projected,’ said Johnny Moore, ‘was specifically local and really good. The subject matter was clean, and the lyrics were really educative. The statements might be a bit serious, but the way they projected it you could absorb what they were saying. There were some good lessons, we had to admit that.’

      However, Beverley Kelso was surprised at the version of the song that was released. In fact, on it there was a vocal error by Peter Tosh, which seemed to appeal to Coxsone. ‘We had a better cut than the release. We was singing when the musicians come in, but Peter comes in at the wrong point and says “simmer”, and Coxsone said that’s it, that was the one that he wanted. So, it was a mistake, but it was made into something that wasn’t a mistake.’

      New to the line-up, Beverley kept very much to herself at the session: ‘They said I was shy. I don’t think I was shy to sing, but after singing I wouldn’t say a word. If you say something to me I would answer you. I would sing and Bob and Peter and Bunny would be one place with all the rest of the guys and I would be just by myself. I was an observer.’ Unlike Leonard Dillon, Beverley confirmed that Bob appeared to be the acknowledged leader of the group. And that rigour was the middle name of their work ethic.

      ‘It was like every day or every other day we would be in the studio. If we’re not recording for ourselves, we were backing up other people because we have other people coming and singing. Like, for instance, if Tony Gregory or anybody in the studio want back-up we would just come in and harmonise. Everybody would just back-up, either you back sing, clap, whatever you wanna do over there to back-up everybody. So we was in the studio most of the time. We were like a family. And there were times when we didn’t go home. We would be in the studio like two, three days.

      ‘When Junior was leaving to go to America they were doing an album and for like, two, three days we would be in the studio. We didn’t have place to sleep. We didn’t even have no time to sleep. It was just fun in the studio. We would eat and would sit down and get a little nap. Sometimes I would run home and come right back. We have the privilege to go into that studio that most people they couldn’t come in.’

      Bob was also learning some good lessons himself. A number of the musicians he now began playing with at Studio One – Johnny Moore himself, for example – were dedicated and devout Rastafarians. For years, Bob’s Bible had rarely been out of his sight. Now he began to be offered new, apocalyptic interpretations that would make his jaw drop with disbelief. Sometimes he would wander away from Studio One after a day’s sessions in a mystified haze, as he struggled to process the biblical information and interpolations to which he had been made privy.

      Bob’s soul was being nourished. In addition, he now had sufficient funds to pay for the nutrition of his body: as well as having ordered gold lamé collarless suits – a kind of Beatle jacket version of the famous ensemble worn by Elvis Presley on the sleeve of Elvis Gold Discs Volume 2 – for the three men in the group, Coxsone had also put them each on a weekly wage of £3.

      ‘We all used to go to church to search, and knowing that we found reality and righteousness we relaxed,’ recalled Peter Tosh. ‘So when you saw us in the slick suits and things, we were just in the thing that was looked on as the thing at the time. So we just adjusted ourselves materially.’

      ‘Simmer Down’ was followed up by an official release for ‘It Hurts to be Alone’, another hit; curiously, even though the song had been written and sung by Junior Braithwaite, the title could definitively sum up Bob’s feelings about substantial chunks of his life. For the rest of 1964, the Wailing Wailers were rarely out of the Jamaican charts, with a string of tunes recorded at 13 Brentford Road: ‘Lonesome Feeling’, ‘Mr Talkative’, ‘I Don’t Need Your Love’, ‘Donna’ and ‘Wings of a Dove’. ‘Mr Dodd’ was not unhappy.

      Coxsone became another father figure to Bob, and to a lesser extent, to Bunny and Peter. When he learned that Bob didn’t have a home of his own, he

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