Millie Small
THE YEAR was 1964 and Britain was to be tuned to the sounds of a high-pitched female voice from Jamaica. A voice which belted 'My Boy Lollipop', a song which went on to sell in excess of 7 million copies and became one of the earliest hits in the island's indigenous music form, ska.
It topped the British charts and went to No. 2 in the United States, giving young producer Chris Blackwell his first international hit.
Known as 'The Blue Beat Girl', Millie Small, didn't go on to do much more, but she had previously recorded several songs in Jamaica, some as part of a duo with Roy Panton, known as Roy and Millie. Blackwell picked her from the Studio One stable after she performed at a concert at the Ward Theatre.
Whereas the bulk of the credit almost always goes to Millie Small for My Boy Lollipop, the arranger and chief musician, Jamaica's greatest guitarist of all times, Ernest Ranglin, was instrumental in the creation of the song.
Recent unconfirmed reports suggested that Millie Small was still in England, rebounding from hard times. Her contribution to the development of Jamaican music might have been one-off, but it was so great that My Boy Lollipop still reigns as one of the most widely used Jamaican songs in films all over the world today.
