Byron Lee and Mighty Sparrow: Try A Little Tenderness

Byron Lee was an originator of ska music, though his uptown reputation was contentious in the slum neighborhoods of Kingston. Half Chinese-Jamaican, Lee was recipient of many Chinee-man slurs. But besides his being treated as a racial outsider, he was also considered both musically inauthentic and a bandleader of questionable talent. He took ska just as it was on the up and up, dressed it in a tuxedo, and brought it to the high-class tourist hotels to make some bank.

The ultimate reward for Lee and his desire to bring ska out of the ghetto was an invitation to play at the Jamaica pavilion of the World's Exhibition in New York City in 1964. The folks in Kingston were none too pleased, considering this guy's version of ska was very mannered and polished, nothing like the rootsy and raw stuff they were playing back home. Meanwhile, the set didn't even go over that well (perhaps for that reason), and a bubbling interest in ska never took hold in the States.

Here's Byron Lee, half a decade later, teaming up with calypso king Mighty Sparrow, to cover "Try A Little Tenderness." I think comparing this to the Otis original is not unlike what it would have been like to compare Lee's version of ska to the stuff coming out of Kingston in the early 60s.