SKANK YOUR ENTHUSIASM (15)
By:
November 21, 2025
One in a series of enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, analyzing and celebrating our favorite… ska records! PLAYLIST HERE. Series edited by Josh Glenn.
The opening ten seconds or so of “Oh Carolina” by the Folkes Brothers sounds like American-style 1950s R&B: hammering piano intro, handclaps. As soon as the lead vocal and the chanting response come in, though, we are in the Caribbean. Some say this is the first ska record, but is there ever a first anything? The choppy beat doesn’t quite kick over to a skank, I don’t think — to my anachronistic ear, it suggests the playground or the school bus. What sounds new, what raises the hairs on the back of my neck, is the ring of a hand drum with a metal resonator. Producer Prince Buster had brought in nyabinghi drum master Count Ossie and his Mystic Revelation of Rastafari for the session, and that was a first, and it caused a sensation in Jamaica.
Another place I used to pass was up Wareika Hill. I used to pass there by Count Ossie.
That’s Mackie Burnette, my stepfather, who my mother met in Kingston, Jamaica, when she was doing a stint in the Peace Corps. Mackie was born in Trinidad and took up the steelpan as a teenager. “A panman is a very bad man,” he told me once, because he knew how to delight me with words. Here, he was telling my mother about a carefree time in the late Sixties, early Seventies, when he was living easy between cruise ship gigs.
Pass there by the Count. A little drawool out. And then sometimes when night catch me, he have a car seat in a little room … over a time span I cool off there again a one night. So then a regular pattern used to be like Sigurny, Negus, a one night Daddy, a one night Count, Sigurny. So it was always fresh.
Sigurny was an east-side beach. Negus was Negus Vanq, a Rastafarian elder who ran a cultural salon and sold weed and banana juice. (“You know what is vanq? Vanquish. He had this little house built on captured land.”) Daddy was a friend from Trinidad.
It had to be explained to me that Count Ossie’s Wareika Hill compound was where everything came together — nyabinghi drumming, Rastafarianism, the membership of the Skatalites — that was necessary to potentiate the reggae idiom. I imagine it was where Mackie the panman honed his hand-drumming skill.
Count Ossie recorded another version of “Oh Carolina” for his wild three-disk 1972 album, Grounation — a track that manages to sound older, more rooted, and at the same time way hipper than the original. I have no reason to believe Mackie was one of the drummers in the room, but it harms no one for me to picture him there. Or at least in a car seat nearby, having been caught by the night.
SKANK YOUR ENTHUSIASM: INTRODUCTION by Josh Glenn | Lucy Sante on Margarita’s WOMAN COME | Douglas Wolk on Millie’s MAYFAIR | Lynn Peril on Prince Buster’s TEN COMMANDMENTS | Mark Kingwell on The [English] Beat’s TEARS OF A CLOWN | Annie Nocenti on Jimmy Cliff’s MISS JAMAICA | Mariane Cara on The Selecter’s ON MY RADIO | Adam McGovern on The Specials’ GHOST TOWN | Josh Glenn on The Ethiopians’ TRAIN TO SKAVILLE | Susannah Breslin on The [English] Beat’s MIRROR IN THE BATHROOM | Carl Wilson on Prince Buster / Madness’s ONE STEP BEYOND | Carlo Rotella on The Mighty Mighty Bosstones’ THE IMPRESSION THAT I GET | Rani Som on The Bodysnatchers’ EASY LIFE | David Cantwell on Desmond Dekker’s 007 (SHANTY TOWN) | Francesca Royster on Joya Landis’ ANGEL OF THE MORNING | Mimi Lipson on Folkes Brothers’ OH CAROLINA | Alix Lambert on The Specials’ TOO MUCH TOO YOUNG | Marc Weidenbaum on Dandy Livingstone’s RUDY, A MESSAGE TO YOU | Heather Quinlan on Fishbone’s MA & PA | Will Hermes on The [English] Beat’s WHINE & GRINE / STAND DOWN MARGARET | Peter Doyle on The Skatalites’ GUNS OF NAVARONE | James Parker on The [English] Beat’s SAVE IT FOR LATER | Brian Berger on The Upsetters’ RETURN OF DJANGO | Annie Zaleski on The Mighty Mighty Bosstones’ SOME DAY I SUPPOSE | Deborah Wassertzug on The Bodysnatchers’ TOO EXPERIENCED | Dan Reines on The Untouchables’ I SPY FOR THE FBI.
JACK KIRBY PANELS | CAPTAIN KIRK SCENES | OLD-SCHOOL HIP HOP | TYPEFACES | NEW WAVE | SQUADS | PUNK | NEO-NOIR MOVIES | COMICS | SCI-FI MOVIES | SIDEKICKS | CARTOONS | TV DEATHS | COUNTRY | PROTO-PUNK | METAL | & more enthusiasms!