The Griot | Stories Roots Legacy

Leslie Kong had no musical training, couldn't read music, and ran an ice cream shop on Orange Street Kingston. He also discovered Bob Marley's first recording session, launched Jimmy Cliff's career, produced the first Jamaican record to top the UK Singles Chart, and built a music empire that shaped reggae's international future — before dying at thirty-seven after ignoring a warning that became th...

Before the verdict was read, the jury asked the judge for protection. That tells you everything you need to know about Delroy "Uzi" Edwards. Born in Tivoli Gardens, Kingston, Edwards was forged in the blood politics of Jamaica's 1980 election — one of the deadliest in Caribbean history. When the political violence ended and the government discarded its enforcers, Edwards followed the pipeline nort...

In April 1970, soldiers of the Trinidad Regiment boarded armed gunboats and sailed toward Port of Spain — not to suppress the uprising, but to join it. This episode of History of the Caribbean tells the full story of Trinidad's fifty-six-day Black Power Revolution: the marches of ten thousand, the forced removal of colonial statues, the historic army mutiny under Lieutenant Rex Lassalle, US warshi...

Before the recording studios. Before the international labels. Before the world knew what Jamaica was capable of — three men were running speaker systems in Kingston's open yards, competing for the loyalty of a working-class community that needed music the way it needed air. Tom The Great Sebastian. Duke Reid. And King Edwards — the foundational figure the written record has been slowest to reclai...

Lester Lloyd Coke — known as Jim Brown — was the most powerful gang don Jamaica ever produced. From the bullet-riddled streets of Denham Town to the corridors of political power in Kingston, he built the Shower Posse into a transnational criminal empire that flooded forty American cities with crack cocaine, left bodies across two continents, and operated with the full knowledge — and alleged prote...

The full story of The Skatalites — the Jamaican instrumental supergroup that invented ska. From the Alpha Boys' School alumni who formed its core, to Don Drummond's brilliance and tragic end, to Jackie Mittoo's musical legacy across two continents.

Easter Sunday, 1816. Barbados. Thousands of enslaved people rose up and burned the cane fields — and the woman who told them why they had to do it has been erased from the story for 210 years. Nanny Grigg was enslaved at Simmons Plantation in Saint Philip. She could read. She followed the British Parliamentary debates about the Registry Bill. She gathered people and explained what the newspapers s...

In February of 1763, an enslaved Akan man named Cuffy led the largest slave revolt in Dutch colonial history — and then formally proposed splitting the colony of Berbice with the Dutch governor in writing. The letter he signed as 'Governor of the Black People of Berbice' still exists in the Dutch National Archives. This episode tells the story of the Berbice Rebellion: eight months of a provisiona...

The definitive story of Frederick Nathaniel Hibbert — the man who named reggae, sang like Otis Redding, and spent 50 years in the shadow of an icon he helped create.

He built the most important recording studio in Jamaican music history. He recorded The Wailers, The Skatalites, Burning Spear, Dennis Brown, and hundreds of others at 13 Brentford Road — and he owned everything they made. Clement "Coxsone" Dodd is the single most influential figure in the architecture of ska, rocksteady, and roots reggae, and the most controversial. Artists who passed through Stu...

He wasn't a gunman. He was an architect. In 1973, seventeen-year-old Vivian Blake boarded a plane to New York as part of a Jamaican cricket team tour — and never came back. What he built instead was the most sophisticated Caribbean drug distribution network in American history: a cellular cocaine operation spanning 20+ US cities, reaching as far as Alaska, responsible for an alleged 1,400 drug-rel...

In October 1878, three women known as the Fire Queens led 300 workers in burning 53 sugar estates across St. Croix in the Danish West Indies. The uprising — called the Fireburn — was the most dramatic labor rebellion in Caribbean history. Queen Mary Thomas, Axelina Salomon, and Mathilda Salomon were convicted and imprisoned in Denmark for life. Mary Thomas died in a Danish cell in 1895. She never...

In September 1998, the streets of downtown Kingston were on fire. Tires burned. Guns fired into the air. Four people died. And the entire Jamaican security apparatus — police, politicians, military brass — could not stop it. One man could. Donald "Zeeks" Phipps walked to the balcony of the Kingston Central Police Station, raised his hand, and the riot stopped. This is the story of how a man from M...

Duke Reid — The Trojan — walked into every recording session at Treasure Isle with two pistols on his hips and a shotgun across his back. The session musicians showed up on time. They played correctly. And they made some of the most important Jamaican music ever recorded. This is the full story of the man who built Treasure Isle Records and defined the rocksteady era — before Bob Marley, before Le...

Before the Shower Posse. Before the cocaine wars. Before Jamaica's garrisons became transnational crime empires — there was a white van, thirty Honda motorcycles, and a Rastafarian enforcer named George "Feathermop" Spence who made Kingston's most powerful politicians untouchable and their enemies afraid to sleep. This is the story the history books skipped. Feathermop was not a random criminal. H...

Before hip-hop existed, Count Machuki — real name Winston Cooper — was already doing it. In the yards of West Kingston in the early 1950s, working the mic for Tom the Great Sebastian's sound system, he invented toasting: rhyming, improvising, calling to the crowd over a moving riddim. Everything that would become dancehall, reggae DJ culture, and ultimately hip-hop grew from what he started. This...

In March 2026, a Russian oil tanker quietly entered Cuban waters — and President Trump told reporters he had "no problem with it." No press conference. No policy statement. Just sixty-four years of the most sustained economic embargo in modern history stepping aside for a single geopolitical signal between Washington and Moscow. But this isn't just a story about one ship. It's a story about how th...

Burry Boy was Jamaica's most feared political enforcer — the man who built the Concrete Jungle and died with a prime minister walking behind his casket. In this episode of Jamaican Gangster, we tell the full, verified story of Winston Blake — known in the streets of Kingston as Burry Boy — the PNP's first top-ranking don, the architect of Arnett Gardens' garrison community, and the man whose 1975...

When Venezuela defeated the United States 3–2 in the 2026 World Baseball Classic championship, it wasn't just a baseball game — it was eighty years of history landing in a center fielder's glove. In this episode, we trace how American oil companies first brought baseball to Venezuelan lowlands in the 1940s, how the country transformed an imported sport into its most powerful cultural language, and...

Three hundred years before a research submersible descended into the waters off Dominica, the Kalinago people had already named what lived there. They called it  oualie wouri  — the water that does not return. European missionaries filed it under superstition. In March 2026, a deep-sea expedition confirmed it was science.

In 1947 Kingston, a Chinese-Jamaican merchant named Tom Wong built Jamaica's first sound system and changed the world. He invented the lawn dance, the sound system clash, and gave Count Machuki the microphone that birthed the MC tradition. Everything downstream — reggae, dancehall, hip-hop — traces to his yard on Orange Street. This is the story of Tom The Great Sebastian: the man who started it a...

Before the dons. Before the garrisons. Before the posses. There was one man — a five-foot-three fugitive from colonial Kingston who shot his way through a police cordon in his underwear, taunted detectives by name in the newspaper, and built Jamaica's first gangster myth with nothing but two guns and a pen. This is the true story of Vincent "Rhyging" Martin — the original rude boy, the folk anti-h...

This episode dives deep into the outlawed spiritual and mystical traditions of the Caribbean — Obeah, Vodou, Santería, Shango and Revival — and exposes how colonial powers tried to criminalize Black religion while never truly understanding it. We follow the story from slave plantations in Jamaica, Haiti, Cuba and Trinidad, through brutal Obeah laws and missionary campaigns, to the survival of Afro...

Jamaica Carnival in March 2026 looks like pure party—feathers, glitter, soca, and road marches through Half-Way-Tree and New Kingston. But behind the costumes and corporate branding is a much older story the cameras almost never show: African resistance, Jonkonnu masquerade, plantation memory, and the quiet fight over who really owns Jamaica’s streets. In this episode of “The History of the Caribb...