Vibe Merchants: The Sound Creators of Jamaican Popular Music Ashgate Popular and Folk Music Series

Vibe Merchants offers an insider?s perspective on the development of Jamaican Popular Music, researched and analysed by a thirty-year veteran with a wide range of experience in performance, production and academic study. This rare perspective, derived from interviews and ethnographic methodologies, focuses on the actual details of music-making practice, rationalized in the context of the economic and creative forces that locally drive music production. By focusing on the work of audio engineers and musicians, recording studios and recording models, Ray Hitchins highlights a music creation methodology that has been acknowledged as being different to that of Europe and North America. The book leads to a broadening of our understanding of how Jamaican Popular Music emerged, developed and functions, thus providing an engaging example of the important relationship between music, technology and culture that will appeal to a wide range of scholars.

Ray Hitchins has worked in the Jamaican music industry since 1981. In addition to his credits as a touring and studio musician, he ran a successful Kingston-based production company and in 2011 completed a PhD in ethnomusicology at Leeds University. He currently lectures at The University of the West Indies, Jamaica.