"Wake the town and tell the people" rings the trademark battle cry of Jamaican deejay extraordinaire U-Roy, who plays three live dates in Japan this weekend.
When the 63-year-old started out as a "DJ" in the early 1960s, he used to play his own records, but, like a number of other Jamaicans inspired by the disc jockeys on American R&B radio shows of the '50s and '60s, U-Roy (real name Ewart Beckford) began punctuating his selections with bursts of chat (or "toasts") of his own to whip up the crowd.
The phenomenon soon took off, and the "deejay" (spelled just so) became a star in his, or later, her, own right -- ruling the Jamaican dancehalls and the sound systems that filled them, such as King Tubby's Home Town Hi Fi, which U-Roy would go on to join.