Hometown: Kingston, Jamaica
Period: early '60s to present

Featured artists:
Nana McLean
Nina Soul
Marcia Griffiths
Dawn Penn
Cecile Campbell
Darlene Darlington
Doreen Schaffer
Webber Sisters
Little Audrey
The Jay Tees
Jennifer Lara
Myrna Hague
Norma Frasier
Jerry Jones
Hortense Ellis

I had never heard any of these songs before I cranked it up the first time, and now I've got all 16 of them memorized. Sure, they're just straight-ahead reggae pop tunes done by women artists from the same studio over a thirty-odd year span, but they're really solid reggae pop tunes, and they're done well and they're really infectious. What else do you need to know?

Oh yeah: details. Well, let's just say that this CD has the original version of Dawn Penn's "No No No" on it. Now, if you know your reggae, you will be salivating on your keyboard right now, because this is apparently a huge landmark track in Studio One and Jamaican history. If you're just a novice like me, you will be blown away by how a song with only about thirty different words - and apparently mastered in a wet basement, all respect to Coxsone but this is some swampy-sounding music up in here - can affect your nervous system so quickly: "No no no/You don't love me and I know now" is now engraved on my DNA and will be with me forever. There are a lot of songs like that on this CD: Marcia Griffiths' title track; Little Audrey's "Sea Puss and Bammie" (get your damn mind out the gutter - it's a song about food.); Myrna Hague's "What About Me;" and the list keeps rocking.

As always, the real finds are the weird ones. "Buck Town Corner" is the dubbiest and trippiest of these songs, by the very charmingly unschooled vocal group The Jay Tees, two djs who instruct you that "if you want the good sensemilla/I said fi check out a dread called Jah Lloydie." We are admiring the Cat Stevens song (I know it best from the ugh Rod Stewart version) "The First Cut Is the Deepest" by Norma Fraser, although the "previously unreleased extended mix" is so elephant-fisted that you can still hear the ghost of Norma's voice lingering under the musical track. But by far the best song here is the great progressive protest song "Compared to What," done most famously by Les McCann and Eddie Harris but represented here by Jerry Jones' passionate and sexy vocals. Oh, that woman could sell a song. Damn.

So that's that. It's a brilliant disc and a lot of fun to listen to. Not the most consistent collection, but pretty damned high quality throughout. Don't be afraid of Jah Lloydie - get your ass down to the store and do your duty.