Click on the image to play.


1967

RAM JAM * JACKIE MITTOO * COXSONE 7019 * UK

Jackie Mittoo's first solo session gave us Ram Jam, the song is named after the legendary nite club The RamJam Club  in Brixton South London. Jackie Mittoo toured there in the mid 1960s with the Soul Vendors as part of a Coxsone Dodd Studio 1 review. The club stood in the heart of what was a favorite London borough for West Indian immigrants to settle during the 1950s and 1960s. At first, during the early 1960s, with such DJ legends as Duke Vin, Count Shelley and Count Suckle on the turn tables, the club played a lot of American Soul music alongside Ska and other Jamaican tunes. And, because of the music, was one of a handful of clubs favored by young Mods, who would dance and pose side by side with the local black patrons, many of which, who unlike the white teenagers, would be in their twenties, thirties, forties, and even older (were talking mostly men). The group most associated with the club in its early days was Geno Washington and the Ram Jam band, who, like Georgie Fame and the Blue Flames  at the Flamingo in Wardour Street Soho London, could be found playing most of the 'off ' nights, and as a fill in when no special guest's were playing. Many of the big names in British and American popular music also played there including Otis Redding and Jimi Hendrix. Jackie Mittoo's original rhythm has been used countless times since it first surfaced on a Studio 1 seven inch in Jamaica, the first big hit from it came with the Heptones song Fat Girl a hit in its own right. Other, now famous folk, were to be found there at one time or another Linton Kwesi Johnson used to go there as a youth in the mid 1960s, as did 'Judge Dread' who claims to have been a bouncer there. Possibly because of their autonomous nature, places like the RamJam have a incommensurable social significance and yet figure hardly at all in the official narratives of the period. A recent mention from 'YOUNG' a Nordic 'journal of youth research' gives what sounds like an exaggerated account from the late 1960s, when, it must be said, there started to be some tension for white youth going to places like the Ram Jam.

For other Jackie Mittoo tracks see: 

Dancing Groove

Drum Song

Hook Up

Warfare

Can I Change My Mind

Jerico Skank

Killer Diller


RETURN TO THE STUDIO 1 PAGE