Delroy Wilson: Makes the Ugly Sweet

For anybody taking notes, we here at the Institute of the Deep and Real have by now covered two of the three "masters" of Jamaican soul singing: Anton Ellis and Ken Boothe. I give these guys the reverential status treatment because they are the most innovative and most expressive and have the deepest, most consistent bodies of work out of many brilliant and under-known Jamaican soul singers. I hate to play favorites, but these are my favorites.

I've saved the best for last, the one who really ushered in my infatuation: Delroy Wilson. Delroy makes the ugly sweet. He bends into notes from the wrong direction: the blues taught everybody to slide up, but Delroy slides down. He can sing a flat note with such conviction that the harmonic rules of the universe will bend around his voice until the note is no longer flat and everything else is wrong. Delroy drops embellishments through his performances that are little eggs of solid gold, hooks so strong and strange they deserve to have whole songs built around them.

This is what I know: after coming to love Delroy's singing with all of the love and fervor of a religious conversion, I hesitantly played some for the guys in my band, hoping they wouldn't soil my experience by not "getting it." I needn't have worried. They got it so bad. I have all the memories I'll ever need of the four of us on a desolate tour in a desloate tour van singing in unison every "baby" and upside-down-blues-bend "yeaaaah," of "Your Number One."

Delroy's voice isn't the prettiest, or even the huskiest, of the best soul singers I've heard. It's just the Delroyist. It's its own kind of ugly sweet.

Delroy Wilson - "Your Number One"

Delroy Wilson - "This Life Makes Me Wonder"

Delroy Wilson - "This Old Heart of Mine"

Delroy Wilson - "Got To Get Away"