Search - Barry Biggs :: Reggae Mix

Barry Biggs is best-known for his string of commercial reggae hits in the mid-to-late seventies, when Work All Day, Sideshow, You're My Life, Three Ring Circus, What's Your Sign Girl, and Wide Awake In A Dream established him as one of Jamaica's most soulful and successful hit makers. All were cover versions, but that didn't matter to his largely female audience, who couldn't get enough of his sweet falsetto, and the way he interpreted favourite songs by the likes of Blue Magic, the Moonglows, Temptations, and Blues Busters. His debut had arrived in 1969 at a session for Harry J, the producer of Liquidator and Bob & Marcia's Young, Gifted & Black. Barry's choice of song was My Cherie Amour, by Stevie Wonder. It wasn't a hit, but his potential was clearly evident. After spells with Derrick Harriott and also the Astronauts, he was then asked to join Byron Lee and the Dragonnaires, who were amongst Jamaica's most popular recording and touring acts at the time, despite the emergence of roots reggae singers like Bob Marley and Burning Spear. Barry wasn't the only neatly dressed and coiffured balladeer to suffer for lack of support during the craze for dreadlocks and Rastafari, but since it was aim to secure lasting crossover appeal, he had no hesitation in sticking to his guns, and recording songs with a mainstream audience in mind. A cover of the Edison Lighthouse hit, Love Grows, was a fine, early example of this, although Biggs had other qualities too, as he demonstrated when producing hits by the Slickers and Barrington Levy at Byron Lee's Dynamic studios. By this time, he was covering hits by groups like the Chi-Lites and Detroit Spinners with considerable finesse. Some of them were included on albums by the Dragonnaires, although he was also beginning to write and record his own material, as heard on songs like Why Must You Cry and Love You Baby. None were especially successful, and it wasn't until he'd revived Work All Day in 1975 that his sequence of crossover hits began. This album contains many of his finest songs, as well as those well-known seventies' classics, and has the added bonus of several newer tracks. Taken as a whole, it's a fitting testament to an artist who's often been overlooked in the past, yet has made an enduring contribution to the world of Jamaican reggae and soul nevertheless. John Masouri