Winston ‘Merritone’ Blake, Jamaican Sound System Pioneer, Dead at 75
Billboard Magazine, 3/1/2016 by Patricia Meschino Winston “Merritone” Blake, the venerated Jamaican musicologist, producer, and owner/operator of Merritone Music, succumbed to complications from asthma on Feb. 27 at a Kingston hospital. He was 75. Merritone is Jamaica’s oldest continually operational sound system, founded in 1950, prior to the emergence of the island’s indigenous popular music forms and its prolific recording industry. “We were here before reggae, when R&B records were played alongside calypso, mento and country and western, that’s what filled Jamaica’s dance floors back then,” Blake reminisced Continue reading →