A vital argument can be made for Jamaican pioneer Prince Buster’s role as the creator of ska, the island’s first music of its own devising.  Born Cecil Bustamente Campbell on May 28, 1938, he adapted his middle name, that of one of Jamaica’s founding father/politicians, twisting it from Busta to Buster, and added the Prince when he began a short boxing career in his teens.

In a lengthy and revealing 2007 interview, he told British author John Masouri “I don’t think I see anyone in Jamaica ever admire another politician like William Alexander Bustamante, because he was for the people. He stood up as a lone white man in a crowd of angry soldiers and police… There were stones being thrown, and people getting killed… It was left just him, and they were going to shoot some people in the park when he stepped forward and said, ‘Shoot me, and save the innocent people of Jamaica.’”  This pugnacious attitude took roots in the slender youth, helped along by the discipline of the Boy Scouts, of whom he became an avid member. “Yeah, I was coming out of the Scouts, so along the road coming up, there were some people and institutions I pass through that turned out great for me, principle wise. Because everybody on Orange Street at that time [site of almost all the record shops in Kingston], older than me, big people, discipline and principles were very important to them, and I grow up in that atmosphere, and so some of that is still with me.”

He started singing as a youth in churches while growing up in Back-a-Wall, a slum district that was the site of present day Tivoli Gardens. Lloyd “Bread” MacDonald, co-founder of the Wailing Souls, grew up nearby, and remembers as a little boy getting “shoes boxes and wire and string them up in the yard and play like we had a sound system with Buster’s little brother, Tototo. Because Prince Buster in those days had a little sound inna him yard.  But right besides Buster, you had Tom the Great Sebastian, Duke Reid, over ‘pon Bond Street, and coming down from Beverley’s you have Studio One,” all major players in those nascent days of discovery and innovation....
 

From Roger Steffens' essay