Byron Lee and the Dragonaires as they would have appeared in Dr No	Byron Lee struming his guitar	A Profile of Byron Lee in later years	Byron Lee and the Dragonaires

G12 Kicker: Track 30: Hot, Hot, Hot by Byron Lee and the Dragonaires

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At the top left is a picture of Byron Lee and his band, the Dragonaires, as he appeared in a film in the early 60's. The pictures that follow show him at an older age. Lee founded his band, The Dragonaires, while attending St George College (which might explain the name of the band), in 1956 and he helped create several musical genres during his lifetime. He died in Nov'08, 2008 but up to the time of his death, he continued to lead his band

Lee's background includes a Jamaican Mother and Chinese father. He also was an astute business man as it's very difficult to find free selections of his music. Long before the internet, he was making sure that use of his songs would be at a cost.

The kicker chosen for G12 is the rendition by this same Byron Lee of a favorite Ska crossover into merangue, Hot, Hot, Hot which should, assuming you have windows media player, be coming out of your audio. Research on the internet (and it's impossible to determine whether this is 100% accurate) indicates that the song originated with the Jamaican band, Arrow. If not Arrow, surely some other Jamaican band would have created the song because its music and lyrics have all the characteristics of a Jamaican song. It became an instant favorite as far as ballroom dancing was concerned. If you did the merangue at any club during the late 80's, you were dancing to this music.

There are two things that you realize when studying this era of music in the islands:
First, all the bands sound similar. Unless you are from Jamaica, all Jamaican accents sound the same to a non Jamaican. We're sorry if this sound's politically incorrect, but that's to an American ear. So, any version of Hot, Hot, Hot put on G12 would have sounded the same to you. The only reason that Byron Lee was picked was that the disk coordinator is doing some other research on him which you can read about by clicking the 'jump up' link at the end of this page.

Second, if you heard this song in a concert, the lyrics represented below would have differed even if you were only following one specific band at any or all of its concerts. Since this type of Jamaican sound comes out of jazz, lyrics and shouts are spontaneous and very subject to change. You could even add changes to the music to this argument as different instruments at a band performance would riff given the individual musician's mood at the time of play.

However, whatever version and band you would listen too, you had to feel the power and draw of the music. The theoretical lyrics of Byron Lee's rendition of this song are listed below, but they are not followed in the G12 version. However, two words of the lyrics should be indicated to you.

One is 'Jam' which is similar to the jazz version of the word - this is a play of a song and since most songs were derived from 'jam' sessions, you can see where this would be derived. It would act like 'rag' that was used as a title for every Charleston song created in the 1920's. And by the way, if you are a mummers fan and listen to string band music, much of that music derives from the 20's and has the terminology 'rag' in the name.

The other is rum, a very important drink, since most rum is produced in the Caribbean, including Jamaica. Run ingrediants are sugarcane by way of molasses (a by product of sugarcane) which ferments into the alcohol used in rum. Since all the islands were at one time or another sugarcane producers, you can see why this would be the drink of choice in that area. Anyway, below is the lyrics to the song found on the Internet (you are already aware that these are different than what you are actually hearing) and, in addition, at the end of this web page is a link to some discussion of Jump Up, Jamaica which is of interest to the disk coordinator.

The disk coordinator's interest in Byron Lee is not in the song 'Hot, Hot, Hot', but in a different song whose appearance in a movie has been a puzzle for some 45 years. The song in question is Jump up, Jamaica (and has been used as the I1 kicker in Dec'09) and is not much different in lyrics than any other Jamaican Ska song of that era (early 60's). But in telling you the length of time of the puzzle, you might be getting an idea of what movie we're talking about.

So, click this link to hear Jump up Jamaica. Perhaps this was Honeychile Rider's favorite song at the time that she emerged from the sea?

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