Thursday, February 02, 2006

Josey Wales Inna Volcano Style

Josey Wales (born Joseph Sterling) began DJing in 1977 on the Roots Unlimited Sound System and obviously took his name from the wildly popular Clint Eastwood film "The Outlaw Josey Wales." After a successful stint with U-Roy's King Sturgav Hi-Fi he eventually joined forces with Junjo Lawes in 1982. His first hit "Leggo Mi Hand" or sometimes called "Gateman" and a string of successive hits catapulted him to the forefront of the DJ Business and established him as a serious contender for King Yellowman's throne.

I am sharing three Josey tracks that I think you'll dig... The first is the 12" of "Love Mi Have Fi Get" on Volcano, again including the Radics version. The second track is a 7" on the Junjo exclusive Arrival label called "Three Blind Mice." The third is another 7" on the Volcano label called "Bouncing." Enjoy!







4 comments:

John AKA Reggaexx said...

Wha' no comments??

John AKA Reggaexx said...

Yeah JD - that is the same riddim! I've got about 10 more on the same. A couple years ago I was inspired by the Mighty Crown Soundsystem's tribute to Volcano CD and gathered up all my Junjo produced vinyl and carted it over to my friends house - he's big into mixing dancehall and I categorized everything by rhythm and he got to work trying to mix them all. But unlike modern dancehall riddims, the tempo and pitch of all the varied Volcano tracks were so different he had one hell of a time trying to crossfade them seamlessly. He got two decent mixes together - if you can overlook a couple skips on a couple tunes - and gave me the two CDRs. He wasn't thoroughly pleased with the results but I've nearly worn them out! He keeps begging me to bring the records over again and insures me he's been practicing on older tunes and has got it down. I guess I'll have to see.

tim andren said...

This comes to you because you appear to be an expert on the subject. Can you possibly help me track down this tune by Josey Wales? It's on this video clip and appears to be a Junjo production.

http://www.megaupload.com/de/?d=XWL41Y7X

Andren

John AKA Reggaexx said...

I appreciate the compliment... I recently received the DVD with that Josey clip on it and I nearly freaked - here was one of Volcano's top performers in the recording studio with Junjo looking on - an amazing piece of dancehall history I never thought I'd get to witness! As for the song Josey was recording... now that's the weird part... I own a ton of Junjo productions and a decent amount of Josey's music and I've never heard it! Perhaps it was a track that never saw the light of day? I'll have to pull out his records and see if I can hear even a snippet of those lyrics in any of the other stuff he did. I've got a Josey Wales live LP and my best guess is that those lyrics were used live with great success but when push came to shove they didn't translate well to vinyl. I'll keep my ears open and let you know if I figure anything out!