Named by Errol Flynn in the 1950s, the Jolly Boys were once the toast of Jamaica. Now, after nearly five decades playing second fiddle to reggae, the band are enjoying a remarkable revival. Will the Jolly Boys finally have the last laugh?
A barbarously sticky afternoon in Jamaica and I'm in Kingston inside a windowless room with a low ceiling and brown carpet on the walls watching five old men. They are all in their 70s – except the ones in their 80s. And they are all wearing hats. The 84-year-old Egbert Watson hunches over a banjo; Joseph "Powda" Bennett, 73, clasps a pair of maracas; Derrick "Johnny" Henry, 71, rests on a rumba box; while Allan Swymmer, 82, hits the bongo. They all watch the last man, 72-year-old Albert Minott, who is seated in front of them, dressed in pale slacks, a bright orange shirt and a tweed fedora and cradling an acoustic guitar. He has a thin face and when he sings we hear a dark, gravelly rumble of a voice and see more gaps than teeth – a reminder of his years as a fire-eater.
Minott is the lead singer of the Jolly Boys, a band that has, with a changing cast of members, been in existence for more than 60 years, leading some to dub them the Jamaican Buena Vista Social Club. The music they play is known as mento and it is a sound that pre-dated and influenced everything from ska to reggae to dance hall. To these musical forms, they are what bluesmen like Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf were to the development of rock 'n' roll, yet the Jolly Boys are unknown outside Jamaica and forgotten inside it. And that is why I am here with them, because this evening the Jolly Boys will be playing the most important show of their lives.
They will be performing at a hip Kingston venue in front of a young audience unused to mento: if the band do well it could reintroduce their music to a new generation; if they fail the music and the band may remain in obscurity. Minott looks at the other members and nods. Swymmer hits the bongo and Powda shakes the maracas and as Watson introduces the jangling chords of the banjo and Johnny picks at the rumba box the mento sound comes alive. It is as if the Jolly Boys have conjured up a musical time machine that is transporting them back, way back, to when it all began.
It was Errol Flynn's idea to call them the Jolly Boys. Back in the winter of 1946, Flynn purchased Navy Island, a small swathe of land a few hundred yards from the coast of Port Antonio on the northeast side of Jamaica. The Hollywood star found himself in Jamaica after his yacht had been caught in a storm and he had quickly fallen in love with the island. During the next decade Flynn often staged wild parties at his home and his favourite entertainment was a local mento band called The Navy Island Swamp Boys. Flynn loved the euphoric atmosphere the band created and nicknamed them the Jolly Boys.
Since then there have been at least 19 members in the band. In Jamaica, mento bands were community orientated and line-ups would grow and evolve, but even when members became too old to play they would still be considered part of the band and, in some cases, paid their share. From that original line-up only Johnny Henry survives and he can still recall swimming off the coast of Port Antonio to eat coconut with Flynn.
The Guardian
