Tubby is to this day synonymous with dub. He was a man who had a passion for fiddling with sound equipment, and turned that passion into a new musical genre and a veritable a King rt form. He may have started his career as a repairman, but before he was done, his name was one of the most respected around the world. He worked with virtually every artist in Jamaica, and his name on a remix was like gold, a seal of quality that was never questioned.
King Tubby was born under the more humble name of Osbourne Ruddock in Kingston, Jamaica, on January 28, 1941. Initially, the closest he got to the music scene was via the airwaves, as Ruddock spent his teens working as a radio repairman. In the mid-’50s, Jamaica was undergoing a revolution that saw the audiences move out of the dancehalls, which had once packed them in with live music provided by big bands, and onto the streets. There the sound systems ruled as traveling outfits set themselves up on a sociable street or corner and blasted records to crowds through a speaker. Initially they were small, but the sound systems quickly grew in size and legend; the competition extremely fierce and often violent. Speakers were the usual victims of these rivalries (sometimes along with the DJs, organizers, and even the audience). The people weren’t the only ones who were damaged, which is why in the late ’50s the operator of a Waterhouse sound system approached Ruddock for help. The repairman fixed that speaker, then another, and another, until he was providing first aid for a variety of sound systems around the city. A born tinkerer, Ruddock inevitably began coming up with ways to improve things as well. He spent years working on other people’s sound systems, but by 1968, he was ready to open his own shop: the legendary Tubby’s Home Town Hi Fi. The sound he provided there was nigh on perfect, which meant King Tubby himself was now beginning to look around for something new to fiddle with. Producer Duke Reid offered the perfect solution via a job at his Treasure Isle studio as a disc cutter. There, King Tubby began deconstructing and reconstructing music in the same way he had sound systems, but these early efforts were really remixes, an already old skill in Jamaica. The remix began as a “version” B-side, nothing more than an instrumental of a vocal track.