In a city known for its rock and punk scenes, the history of reggae in Boston has been all but forgotten. With tracks from reggae artists like Zion Initiation and Danny Tucker, Cultures of Souls Records' 'Take Us Home' gives insight into Boston reggae:
It’s a Sunday afternoon at West End Johnnies in downtown Boston. A band is squeezed onto a little stage beneath a flat screen TV. Lead singer Errol Strength croons Bob Marley's"Is This Love" as he shimmies across the floor.
"Jamaicans, Americans, Trinidadians, people from Asia — all over the place. It was just a melting pot," Strength says."And Cambridge was the ideal place for it, too. Some people were afraid to come to Dorchester or Roxbury. So Cambridge was the neutral ground." But the music told a more complicated story. Boston’s reggae scene emerged in the aftermath of the busing crisis, when the city’s white constituents protested court-ordered school integration. The Jamaican-born musician Danny Tucker was a student in Boston at the time, and he funneled that early experience with racism into songs like “Our Father’s Land.""This land is our father's land," Tucker sings, yearningly."He's for black and he's for white.
"To this day, you have a very vibrant dancehall scene on Blue Hill Ave. every weekend," Schaffer says."And then you still have a nice roots scene at places like Bull McCabe's in Somerville. But you don't have the kind of intermingling that you had back then."
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