29/10/2025
I had a grand aunt who, whenever I visited her as a child, played nothing but Leroy Sibbles and Bim Sherman. Morning till night, that was her little Zion, the same 2 voices circling the air all the time, ofcourse, I was just a little girl growing up, so I had no idea what these two legends meant to her. People around her loved Peter Tosh, Bob Marley and the usual greats but hers was a distinctly different devotion. It was quiet, almost spiritual.
One day my father borrowed one of her prized Leroy Sibbles vinyls. I still remember the red, gold and slightly faded sleeve, and somehow he misplaced it. I will never forget the silence that followed when she found out. It was not anger, it was grief. I could tell, even as a child, that this was not just about a record. It was about memory, about connection, about something she held dear being lost to careless hands. That was when I began to understand that music, especially Reggae, was more than rhythm and riddim. It was lineage!
Years later, when I stumbled on Leroy Sibbles again, the man behind so many basslines that shaped the soul of Studio One, the voice that lifted The Heptones into immortality, it hit me differently...He was the unspoken architect of a sound that raised generations, Leroy Sibbles is not just a Reggae icon, he is a roots elder, the invisible pulse beneath so much of what we call reggae today....And somehow, I think my grand aunt always knew that, long before I did.
