Jackie Opel: Caribbean Musical Visionary

Description

In the pantheon of Caribbean musical heroes, the role and contribution of Jackie Opel (born Dalton Bishop) has been long overlooked and understated.

Elizabeth Watson’s work entitled Jackie Opel: Caribbean Musical Visionary fills several of the many gaps in the scholarship on Jackie Opel’s role in the evolution of key Caribbean music genres that has contributed to the region’s current global pre-eminence inartistic expression. In particular, it incorporates the context of Jamaican popular music within which Opell was a pivotal participant.

The book presents previously unseen material on the life of Opel, chronicling his creative development. It includes a detailed discography, creating a definitive reference source for examining the body or recorded material and establishes the discography’s centrality in the historical narrative. Dr Watson’s extensive research encompasses a wide range of sources to unearth numerous photographs, images of live performances as well as advertisements from the 1960s and 1970s that help capture the mood of the period when Opel reigned.

Co-editors Dr Marcia Burrowes and Professor Mike Alleyne expand their overall editorial overview and conversion of Dr Watson’s original doctoral thesis appropriately titled “Uncovering and Recovering Caribbean Popular Music: Jackie Opel as a Case Study, by providing a contextual introduction. Tey argue that this book appropriately represents Dr Watson’s well-researched, detailed, and illustrated thesis, a view supported by the Division of Culture in the Office of the Prime Minister, joint sponsor of the publication with The University of The West Indies Cave Hill campus, Barbados. Ethnomusicologist Kenneth Bilby notes that the ‘co-editors’ Introduction provides some perspective on how the damaging cultural contradictions bred by colonialism and the class hierarchies it produced, affected the reception and eventual fate of spouge music which has refused to die out definitively.’