Jackie Mittoo At Home and Abroad: The Cultural and Musical Negotiations of a Jamaican Canadian

Donat Roy ‘Jackie’ Mittoo (1948-1990) made significant contributions to the genres of rock steady and reggae as a musician, producer and musical director of Studio One in Jamaica. He is renowned for the number of recordings that he arranged at Studio One, as well as his own instrumental recordings that featured the organ. He was also among a number of Jamaican musicians who migrated to Canada at the end of the 1960s and was active on the music scene in Toronto, as well as in the UK and the USA.

Although Mittoo’s significance to the emergence and dissemination of Jamaican popular music (JPM) is acknowledged by music industry personnel, most studies focus on the big names of reggae and the theme of social protest in their music. Little attention is given to the role of session musicians such as Mittoo and the instrumental recordings that they created. This study attempts to redress this oversight; it will offer the first in-depth account of the career and instrumental recordings of Jackie Mittoo.

This dissertation is in two parts. The first section presents a career biography which situates Mittoo’s role within the collective experience of Jamaican session musicians at home in Jamaica, and abroad in the centers of JPM production in Canada, the UK, and the USA. In part two of this dissertation, I examine four strategies that he used in his instrumental arrangements—straight covers, covers with multiple sources, paraphrases, and remixes— and discuss the complexities associated with his body of work.