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Taken from Bandcamp Daily (Mar 20, 2025)
When Folk Meets Dub and Reggae
by Andy Thomas
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Despite its seeming on paper like an incongruous union, the collision of folk, dub, and reggae, in a way, makes perfect sense. “The use of the term ‘roots’ in both reggae and folk both point to a similar thing: the idea of an understanding where your people and culture come from,” says South London DJ/producer Elijah Minnelli. “So regardless of the difference in location, there is a continuity there,”
Minnelli, one of the most compelling artists exploring this intersection, released Perpetual Musket last year, an album that featured unlikely dub versions of old traditional folk songs. This included a visionary take on “The Lifeboat Mona” from Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger’s 1960 album The New Briton Gazette, written to commemorate the men who died in the freezing waters of Scotland’s St Andrews Bay in December 1959. Minelli’s version mixed deep, haunting folk with atmospheric dub and the spine-tingling vocals of Jamaican singer Earl Sixteen.
“I learned about the roots of Jamaican folk music from an ‘80s radio show by Linton Kwesi Johnson called From Mento to Lovers Rock,” says Minnelli. “The show went deep into how Jamaican music has always been rich in folklore, going back to the work songs that make up the mento traditions.” A fusion of African and European rhythms, mento evolved in the early 1900s as Jamaica’s original folk music and hit its golden era in the middle of the 20th century, when it became the precursor to reggae.
The oral traditions of Jamaica’s original roots music is something else that it shares with folk. “The roots of reggae in calypso and mento are the folkloric stories that brilliantly convey [what at the time were] current events, such as Lord Beginner’s ‘Jamaica Hurricane.’ This is also something that runs through the history of folk, with songs about disasters like ‘Lifeboat Mona’,” says Minnelli.
The connections between reggae and folkloric traditions go much further back than mento, though. “You had all the groups from different African traditions that had their own folk traditions within the drum music of the Pocomania and Kumina religions. The island of Jamaica is rich with that,” says Minnelli.
The ancestor of Nyabinghi drum music, the Kumina religion, dance, and music originated in the Congo and was brought to Jamaica by freed African slaves in the 1840s and 1860s. “Once you beat that drum, you have called the ancestors,” Imogene “Queenie” Kennedy explained in Nyasha Laing’s 2022 documentary Kumina Queen. From St. Thomas Parish in the South East of Jamaica, where Kumina first emerged in the mid-19th century, Queenie became the godmother of modern Kumina music in the 1940s and ‘50s.
The folkloric rituals of Kumina, alongside the West African rhythms of burru, formed the foundations of Rastafarian drumming, which evolved in the Pinnacle commune in the hills of St. Catherine Parish in the 1940s. “Music was, of course, a huge part of life within Pinnacle,” wrote Lloyd Bradley in his book Bass Culture, “And once again it drew inspiration from Africa—meaning it was entirely natural for the drum to form the basis of Rasta music.”
At the start of the 1950s, Count Ossie—who first heard Kumina drumming in St. Thomas Parish where he was born—set up a Rasta community in the Wareika Hills on the east side of Kingston. It was here that the Nyabinghi style of hand drumming, derived from Kumina traditions, evolved during the famous Grounation gatherings. “This drumming imparts the heartbeat rhythm that is the foundational focus of ska and reggae,” says Minnelli. “Without the influence of Nyabinghi, the music may have ended up very different.” Count Ossie and the Mystic Revelation of Rastafari, made up of Count Ossie’s drummers and The Mystics—led by saxophonist Cedric Im Brooks—released the groundbreaking album Grounation in 1972. The fusion of Nyabinghi drumming with jazz, dub poetry, and chanting would be hugely influential to the future of Jamaican music.
Niyabinghi drumming provided the foundation rhythms of ska when it started mixing with the jazz played by musicians from the famous Alpha Boys School in Kingston—among them, members of The Skatalites. “The melodies and rhythms created by The Skatalites in those early years were passed on in a folkloric way,” says Minnelli, “whether that is Tenor Saw interjecting lyrics from the mento song ‘Hold ‘Im Joe’ into ‘Ring The Alarm,’ or Soul Venders creating the ‘Swing Easy’ riddim from an old Yiddish song in the 1960s.”
This cross-cultural lineage provided the inspiration for Minnelli’s own productions. “Hearing people like Yabby You with these Old Testament parables with this deep, mournful, melancholic sound—that always really resonated with me. And I also hear that in some Shirley Collins or Peggy Seeger and Ewan MacColl, right through to other global forms of folk music like Georgian polyphonic singing,” he says. “Then you go from folk to country music—which was always really popular in Jamaica, look at Toots & The Maytals’s ‘Take Me Home Country Roads.’ It’s all tied together. Rather than seeing things as being separate, I like to look at the lineage and the connections.”
Minnelli’s music is not without precedent. While he is undoubtedly best known for his cavernous bass playing in post-punk/dub experimentalists Public Image Ltd, Jah Wobble has often demonstrated his love of folk music, experimenting with the ways it can naturally intersect with dub. Through his long-running project Invaders of the Heart, Wobble has released albums like 1997’s The Celtic Poets and 2003’s English Roots Music, his most explicit dub-folk fusion to date. He continues to explore these intercessions today on tracks like “Old Jewish East End of London Dub,” celebrating the musical roots of the East End of London where he was brought up. “I grew up in Stepney,” he says. “You could still clearly feel the echo of the Shtetl, especially around the many street markets. That mix of Jewish people, Irish people, and others made for a ‘heady brew.’ I made this tune with huge affection in memory of those huddled masses.”
The music Jah Wobble has been making of late continues to explore these folk and dub connections, most notably in the recordings he makes with his wife, acclaimed Chinese harpist Zi-Lan Liao, and his two sons John (Tian Qiyi) and Charlie (GZ Tian). Back in 2008, they worked together on the LP Chinese Dub followed by 2021’ beautiful Guanyin. “You can make a lots of different music ‘dub,’ Wobble told Bandcamp Daily, “but with Cantonese music in particular, it’s not easy because it’s always moving. You’re dealing with pentatonic scales. So it’s about how you approach the rhythm and those melodies and punctuate them so it’s grounded sonically without stopping the flow.”
And therein lies the challenge: How to make these two musical forms work together naturally. Here we present a diverse range of artists who have managed to pull it off.
A traditional Jewish folk song originating from the Old Testament and narrated here through the hauntingly beautiful vocals of legendary Jamaican roots singer Little Roy, “Vine and Fig Tree” set the blueprint for Elijah Minnelli’s 2024 album Perpetual Musket. “Soul Cake” was no less extraordinary, with modern-day dancehall singer Shumba Youth utterly transforming Peter Paul and Mary’s traditional 1963 folk ballad “A Soulin.” Then there was “Wind & The Rain,” featuring the falsetto of Bristol’s Joe Yorke telling a tale of the hardship of inclement weather from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night.
The brainchild of dub vocalist and producer Tom Spirals and Scottish traditional musician Euan McLaughlin, “An Dannsa Dub” translates to “Dub Dance” in Gaelic. Now a six piece, the group fuses the folkloric roots music of Scotland with the bass-heavy sound of Jamaican dub. Here, the communal energy of a traditional Scottish cèilidh folk dance meets a late-night sound system session, uncovering synergies that seem loose on the surface, but in reality are as strong as the roots from whence they came.
Regular listeners of Minnelli’s Soho Radio monthly show The Mustard Hour will know that he searches far and wide for inspiration. Like his DJ sets, the show celebrated “dub in its many forms, kissing teeth with folk and roots music from all over the globe.” So it was no surprise that the first project for his label Breadminster County Council crossed dub with cumbia and folk—to killer effect. It was a theme he continued on the equally essential EP SLATS from 2021.
As well as releasing music on his own Breadminster County Council label, Elijah Minnelli has dropped folk dub gems on the London label Accidental Meetings where other folk futurists are fusing dub and other electronic music. HUUUM’s debut embodies the essence of folk futurism reinterpreting Middle Eastern music into something completely original. The band “sees various dialects, dances, and tunes as a form of revolution, preserving elements that may one day be lost.”
Another label making experimental excursions into dub is the Bristol, UK, imprint Bokeh Versions. One of its earliest outings was an album by German-based Abu AMA. For 2015’s Arabxo Ishara, Ama melded Turkish traditional song, Sufi, and Syrian music with Indonesian field recordings over deep rumbles of sub-bass. The record was dedicated to refugees worldwide, and the label described its contents as purposely reflecting a “disorientating lack of place—wherever you are, you’re arriving here for the first time.” Abu AMA followed it with an equally inspired fusion of folk and dub called AM002, as well as a string of releases on Bandcamp that are all worth investigating.
Following his work with the likes of Sampha and Kae Tempest, unsung South London producer and drummer Kwake Bass collaborated with the Swiss trio Meril Wubslin for an album that fused electronic blues, folk, post-rock, and dub. Recorded in Kwake Bass’s South London studio The Room, Faire Ça resulted from hours of late-night sessions; the results were suitably woozy and hypnotic. Weaving its eclectic influences into something very much its own, the 2024 album for Bongo Jo sent Valérie Niederoest’s folk-rooted vocals and circular minimal guitar of Christian Garcia whirling around in a sea of dubby production.
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