Norma Dodd laid to rest

Howard Campbell, Gleaner Writer

Norma Dodd, wife of legendary music producer Clement Dodd, made her final journey on Saturday with a thanksgiving service for her life at the Holy Trinity Cathedral in Kingston, and interment at the Dovecot Cemetery.

A full cast of family, friends and musicians attended the service. Dodd died August 31 at the University Hospital of the West Indies at age 66.

Daughters Carol and Sandra, her surviving children, led the congregation.

Other relatives there were her brothers Errol and Mark Jarrett, stepson Clement Dodd Jnr and niece Maxine Stowe.

Also in attendance were musicologist and family friend Bunny Goodison, radio personalities Radcliffe Butler, Winston Williams, Owen Brown and Barbara Gloudon, who gave the remembrance.

"In an industry noted for its hype, brutality and one-upmanship, Norma went against the grain," was how Goodison remembered Dodd in his tribute.

Some of the performers who recorded for the Dodds' famous Studio One record company paid tribute in song. Saxophonist Headley Bennett delivered My Mother's Eyes, The Silvertones did a rendition of Sam Cooke's That's Heaven to Me while Jimmy Tucker performed Jerusalem.

Clement 'Coxson' Dodd was a former farm worker who started the Downbeat sound system in the late 1950s, then established Studio One in October 1963. Musicians and reggae historians rate him as one of reggae's greatest producers.

At Studio One, he nurtured the careers of several great Jamaican acts including The Wailers, The Heptones, Bob Andy, Marcia Griffiths, Dennis Brown and Burning Spear.

He died from a heart attack at age 72 in 2004.

The Dodds emigrated to the United States in the 1980s where they established an office for his famed Studio One company in Brooklyn, New York. From their base in Brooklyn, they monitored a Studio One renaissance, thanks to an exclusive distribution deal with Heartbeat Records, an independent company located in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The couple returned to Jamaica in 1998 to manage distribution and recording at the studio's original Brentford Road headquarters.

Norma Dodd was buried next to her husband.