SKANK YOUR ENTHUSIASM (1)
By:
October 2, 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.
For Americans of a certain age, who loved “My Boy Lollipop” as children but had no idea where it came from, our formal introduction to ska came in 1979 with the release of the two Intensified compilations on Island. Volume one was great and volume two was even better. We didn’t yet know that nearly all the cuts on both albums, credited to their singers or maybe the lead player, were the work of the formidable Skatalites, the eight-member powerhouse that was the Jamaican answer to the Wrecking Crew.
The number that stopped me cold every time was on volume two: “Woman Come,” by Marguerita (elsewhere spelled Margarita). What on earth was going on there? She sang, a little off, in a keening, winding melody that didn’t sound Jamaican, while the Skatalites played stop-and-start behind her; it almost sounded as if she and they were playing two different songs. And the lyrics! She was “ya daughter from Manchurian border,” singing to her “ace from outer space,” who “speak the language of the breeze, and harmonize it with the symphonies in the trees.” She “can hear the breeze singing to me, not imaginary sounds but true melodies…”
Anita Mahfood, known professionally as Margarita, was born in Kingston in 1939 to a Lebanese father and a white mother. She grew up to be a dancer, the “Famous Rhumba Queen,” and began writing and performing her own songs, almost the only woman on the island to do so then. She became involved with the Rastafarians, and spent time at Count Ossie’s commune in the Wareika Hills, where the pulse of Nyabinghi drumming went on around the clock. That is where she met Don Drummond, the Skatalites’ trombone genius. Drummond, claimed by some to be the greatest musician Jamaica ever produced, could have had a major international career, but made it no farther than Haiti because he was perilously erratic. He would eat dirt, urinate on stage, hold up traffic by refusing to move out of the street; it is very likely he was schizophrenic. But he and Margarita fell in love and moved in together.
“Woman Come,” from 1964, her only recording, is Margarita’s love song to Drummond. Its vocal is distinctly Arabic-sounding, and its rhythm merges ska with the Nyabinghi pulse. No other recording sounds anything like it. But on New Year’s day, 1965, Margarita absent-mindedly gave Drummond the wrong medicine, and he slept through a scheduled gig. When she came back to the shack they lived in late that night, he stabbed her four times, killing her. Drummond, who turned himself in to the police, claiming she had stabbed herself, was remanded for life to the Bellevue Mental Hospital (in Kingston, Jamaica), where he died four years later, probably from secondary effects of his medication.
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) | Annie Zaleski on The Mighty Mighty Bosstones’ SOME DAY I SUPPOSE | Mimi Lipson on Count Ossie’s 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 | Francesca Royster on Joya Landis’ ANGEL OF THE MORNING | Deborah Wassertzug on The Bodysnatchers’ TOO EXPERIENCED | Dan Reines on The Untouchables’ I SPY FOR THE FBI.
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