If you know one Jamaican female voice from the pre-reggae years, it’s probably not Nora Dean. Ask most people to name the pioneers of Jamaican music and you’ll get a list of men: Coxson Dodd behind the desk, Lee „Scratch“ Perry behind the boards, Bob Marley and the Wailers out front. The women who were there from the start tend to get remembered as footnotes, or as backing vocalists standing just off to the side of someone more famous.

Nora Dean deserves better than that. She was there from the very beginning, and by 1970, the year she recorded „The Valet,“ she’d become one of the boldest, funniest, most quietly subversive voices on the island.

From hymns to Studio One

Dean started, like a lot of Jamaican singers of her generation, in church. As a teenager in Kingston she recorded gospel sides for Clement „Coxson“ Dodd at the legendary Studio One, hymns and religious songs with titles like „Man From Galilee“. She sang in vocal groups too, including a stint with Rita Marley’s Soulettes, and cut early sides for Lee „Scratch“ Perry, putting her in the room with more or less every important name in Jamaican music’s founding years.

Finding her real voice

But somewhere along the way, Nora Dean found her true voice, and it wasn’t a hymn. Working with producer Sonia Pottinger in 1970, she recorded „The Valet“ alongside „Must Get a Man“, two songs that leaned hard into an older Jamaican tradition: mento. And mento, it turns out, is where this story gets really interesting.

Where mento comes from

Long before ska, before rocksteady, before reggae ever existed, there was mento: Jamaica’s own homegrown folk music, its roots going back to the plantations. Enslaved Africans on Jamaica’s sugar estates were sometimes required to play music for their enslavers, often performing European dance forms like the quadrille on fiddles and fifes.

What they created out of that forced encounter was something new, African rhythm fused with European melody, played on hand drums, banjo, acoustic guitar, and the rumba box (a big wooden box you sit on and pluck for the bassline). After emancipation in 1834, this music kept evolving in Jamaica’s hills and villages, becoming the soundtrack of weddings, market days, and street corners. By the 1940s and ‚50s, mento had its golden age, and it directly fed everything that came after it. Without mento, there’s no ska. Without ska, no rocksteady. Without rocksteady, no reggae.

The joke hiding in plain sight

Here’s the part that Austrian listeners might not catch on a first listen: mento was funny. Genuinely, deliberately funny, full of double entendre, thinly veiled sexual jokes, and social commentary disguised as innocent storytelling. It was music made by people who weren’t allowed to gather freely, who weren’t allowed to speak plainly about their masters or their circumstances, so they learned to say things sideways, wrapped in a wink. That tradition of cheeky, coded humour never went away. It became part of Jamaican music’s DNA.

Nora runs with it

By the time Nora Dean picked it up in 1970, that mento wink had a long pedigree behind it, and she ran with it. „The Valet“ carries exactly that spirit: playful, slightly risqué, the kind of song where the joke is hiding just underneath the surface if you’re paying attention. It’s cheekier than it sounds on a casual first listen, which, frankly, is exactly the point. What is this street-peddler selling? Mento’s humour was never meant to hit you over the head; it was meant to make you lean in.

Dean went on to become genuinely known for this. Later in her career she built something of a reputation as one of Jamaican music’s boldest, most risqué voices, years before „slackness“ became a recognised strand of dancehall culture. She was, in a very real sense, doing the groundwork for a lineage of outspoken Jamaican women that runs all the way to today’s dancehall queens.

Give her the credit

So when you cue up „The Valet“ this week, you’re not just hearing a nice piece of 1970 Jamaican pop. You’re hearing a direct line back to the plantations, through a century of coded jokes and double meanings, carried by a teenage gospel singer who grew into one of the cheekiest, most fearless voices of her generation, and who, like so many women in music history, still isn’t as well remembered as the men standing next to her in the studio.

Let’s give her that credit today on Sunny Side Up. She earned it.

A Little Soul songs are curated by Wolfgang Bachschwöll and come from his incredible vinyl collection.