

He was passionate about the music and became friends with the legendary ska and rocksteady artists Prince Buster and Derrick Morgan, who were to have an influence on his musical career.ĭread was a giant of a man, weighing in around 250 pounds, which more than helped with his choice of work as a club bouncer, wrestler (under the monicker “The Masked Avenger”) and eventually debt collector for the ska record label Trojan. He sold millions of records, and was the second biggest selling reggae artist-only beaten in album sales by Bob Marley, though Dread scored more hit singles than Marley-and had the dubious distinction of being the most banned recording artist ever-with a total of eleven singles deemed unsuitable for broadcast during his career.īorn Alexander Minto Hughes in Snodland, Kent, England in 1945, Dread first became a fan of reggae in the 1960s while living with a Jamaican family in Brixton, London.

Music historians typically divide the history of ska into three periods: the original Jamaican scene of the 1960s the 2 Tone ska revival of the late 1970s in Britain, which fused Jamaican ska rhythms and melodies with the faster tempos and harder edge of punk rock forming ska-punk and third wave ska, which involved bands from a wide range of countries around the world, in the late 1980s and 1990s.Judge Dread was a white reggae and ska recording artist who had a string of hit singles during the 1970s. Later it became popular with many skinheads. In the early 1960s, ska was the dominant music genre of Jamaica and was popular with British mods. It was developed in Jamaica in the 1960s when Stranger Cole, Prince Buster, Clement "Coxsone" Dodd, and Duke Reid formed sound systems to play American rhythm and blues and then began recording their own songs. Ska is characterized by a walking bass line accented with rhythms on the off beat. It combined elements of Caribbean mento and calypso with American jazz and rhythm and blues. Ska is a music genre that originated in Jamaica in the late 1950s and was the precursor to rocksteady and reggae.
