Roy Black presents singers in their words

Mel Cooke, Gleaner Writer

There was a time when music collector Roy Black only spoke up on air to announce the time as he hosted the 'Saturday Night Alternative' show on KLAS FM.

Then he started to speak about the music he was playing, Black telling The Gleaner "I have a wealth of information that most people don't have". So he started speaking more as he showcased artistes like Solomon Burke, Ben E. King and the Drifters, still not doing a lot of talking as he gave a receptive public snippets of information about the singers they had been listening to for years.

"As Saturdays passed I started to put in more information. People started to call me, saying that they liked it," Black said. However, he says the station's management took issue with the chatter initially, as they wanted an all-music format, and says "I actually stopped for a couple of weeks". However, he said persons called in and asked by the information flow had ceased.

"I was asked to talk again, and it was from there things started to pick up," Black said.

Now Black, who celebrated a decade on air in 2008, says he fully incorporates the artistes' speaking about their lives and careers themselves into the 'Saturday Night Alternative'. "I go around and I interview the artistes," he said. Among those he has spoken to are Ken Boothe, Marcia Griffiths, Brent Dowe and Leroy Sibbles, and Black says it is easier for him to say which prominent artistes he has not interviewed from the earlier days of Jamaican popular music, rather than list those he has. The prominent pair that has slipped through his recording net is Delroy Wilson and Bob Marley, who both died before he got into the business of recording singers talking.

"When people hear these things it is marvellous," Black said.

There is an added benefit to getting information from the performers' mouths, as, Black said, "a lot of books are misleading. I don't like to get information from books". He said a lot of them are written by foreigners, who simply come to Jamaica and get some information from an unreliable source and print it as gospel.

Black gives The Gleaner the date of celebrated trombonist Don Drummond's birth as an example of erroneous information. He said that while a lot of books say that that Drummond was born in the 1940s, he was born in 1934. Substantiating his claim, Black said "I went to Sister Ignatius from over Alpha Boys' School. She showed me Drummond's admission papers. It indicates he came to Alpha in 1943 at the age of nine years old".

"I try my best to be as authentic as possible," Black said.

Sticking to vinyl

And being authentic goes as far as playing almost exclusively vinyl on air. He is sticking to the black discs even as even CDs are being abandoned to hard drives with many gigabytes of memory. It is how he started, Black saying that after he left Kingston College in 1969 (where he played centre half on the celebrated mid-1960s team) he started collecting records, investing the money from his well-paying job at the Jamaica Telephone Company.

It did not hurt that he often stayed with an aunt who lived at 130 Orange Street, famed for record outlets such as Prince Busters, Caribbean Distributing Company and Beverly's, among others. "Every Saturday I would go to these record shops and collect vinyl," Black said, Easy Snappin' and Muriel among the first songs he bought.

He invested heavily in records by the top three producers of the time, Clement 'Sir Coxsone' Dodd, Arthur 'Duke' Reid and Sonia Pottinger. Black pays special respects to Enid Cumberland of the singing duo Keith and Enid, who worked in Dodd's East Queen and Beeston streets outlet. "I used to ask her to put up some songs for me. As I went in the shop the next Saturday, she would have them as I stepped in," he said.

He has interviewed Enid for the 'Saturday Night Alternative'.

The records have lasted and Black dismisses speculation about their deterioration. "People believe that vinyl scratch, but as long as you put it in the sleeve and don't use bad needle to play them they will last," Black said.

Black was also heavily involved in youth development, putting cash into football gear for youngsters.

Although he was collecting music, Black had no intention of playing publicly, sharing his collection only with friends in the home setting. He started talking, though, saying personalised introductions on the tapes he made for persons who requested music from him. Then, in the 1990s, Black got involved in a collector's series, run from Woodbury Inn on East Road, off Waltham Park Road. From there, Black went into the Appleton Spin-off Competition, placing in the top three on the single occasion he put his discs into the ring.

Eventually, a fellow music collector told Black about a slot opening up on KLAS FM and he went there in June 1998, was introduced to the studio on the first occasion, accompanied by the outgoing presenter on the second and on his own after that.

Now, for the 'Saturday Night Alternative', Black says "I have been hunting sponsors, but it is hard. Is not many people want to sponsor music programmes ... . The listenership is large, but the remuneration is the problem".