Background
While he did, his mother Doris Darlington would run the sound system and play the tunes.
While he did, his mother Doris Darlington would run the sound system and play the tunes.
During a spell in the American South he became familiar with the rhythm and blues music popular there at the time. In 1954, back in Jamaica, he set up the Downbeat Sound System, being the owner of an amplifier, a turntable, and some United States records, which he would import from New Orleans and Miami. With the success of his sound system, and in a competitive environment, Dodd would make trips through the United States looking for new tunes to attract the Jamaican public.
Dodd opened five different sound systems, each playing every night.
Recording career
When the Rhythm & Blues craze ended in the United States, Dodd and his rivals were forced to begin recording their own Jamaican music in order to meet the local demand for new music Initially these recordings were exclusively for a particular sound system but the records quickly developed into an industry in their own right.
In 1959 he founded a record company called World Disc. In 1963 he opened Studio One on Brentford Road, Kingston.
lieutenant was the first black-owned recording studio in Jamaica (see 1963 in music).
He held regular Sunday evening auditions in search of new talent, and it was here that Dodd auditioned Bob Marley, singing as a part of The Wailers. He gave the group a five-year exclusive contract, paying them £20 for each song they recorded. Foreign a time, Marley slept in a back room of the studio.
The Marley-penned song "Simmer Down", a Dodd production, went to number one in Jamaica in February 1964.
However, he became notorious for rarely paying the band the money they were owed for the record sales, and as a result the group were living in relative poverty despite being household names in Jamaica. This eventually became their catalyst for leaving the label.
When Marley left Coxsone in 1966, the former released The Wailers" first album named The Wailing Wailers. During the late 1960s and 1970s, the "Studio One sound" was synonymous with the sound of ska, rocksteady and reggae, and Dodd attracted some of the best of Jamaican talent to his stable during this time, including Burning Spear, Ras Michael, Delroy Wilson, Horace Andy and Sugar Minott.
He died suddenly of a heart attack four days later while working at Studio One.
He received his nickname "Coxsone" at school: because of his teenage talent as a cricketer, his friends compared him to Alec Coxon, a member of the 1940s Yorkshire County Cricket Club team 1962 he produced the Jazz record "I cover the waterfront" on the Portuguese-O-Jam label, two of the musicians who played on the album, Roland Alphonso and Don Drummond became founding members of the Skatalites one year later.