Music|Toots Hibbert, a Father of Reggae, Is Dead
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The first to use the word reggae on a record, he sang in a soulful tone and wrote songs with subtle social commentary, helping bring the sounds of Jamaica to the world.
Toots Hibbert, one of the fathers of reggae music, whose vocals imbued the genre’s sound with an exhortatory power drawn from American soul, died on Friday night in Kingston, Jamaica. He was believed to be 77.
His death, in a hospital, was announced on the social media accounts of his band, Toots and the Maytals. No cause was specified, but he was recently reported to have been hospitalized with Covid-like symptoms.
Mr. Hibbert holds a firm spot in Jamaica’s musical pantheon as the first artist to use the word reggae on a record, on the rollicking 1968 single “Do the Reggay” by his group, which was originally billed simply as the Maytals. By some accounts, it was an accidental coinage — Mr. Hibbert has said he was thinking of “streggae,” local slang for a “raggedy” woman — but it stuck, branding the new sound that would become Jamaica’s greatest cultural export.
Although Mr. Hibbert never attained the same level of global fame as Bob Marley, he was immensely popular in Jamaica and was adored by critics and fellow musicians for a body of work that helped establish some of reggae’s fundamentals.
On classics like “Pressure Drop,” “Monkey Man” and “Sweet and Dandy,” Mr. Hibbert sang in a raw but sweet tone that had echoes of Ray Charles, and he was often compared to other giants of soul music.
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