Not only was he three feet from the mic, but he was on a mic that traditionally you have to be right up on to sound decent. To project on a 58, you literally have to have your mouth on the screen. Not only did Toots have the mic a few feet away from his mouth, his mic of choice was a Shure 58! This is tech-geek stuff, but Shure 58’s are made for the stage so that nothing else comes through them but the voice. Everyone blended perfectly together, and it was super powerful. There were the rockers, that British punk component, and the straight-up rude-boy component.

Even at a young age, what I really dug was the cross-sections of cultures and race in the crowd. And it was madness, as you would imagine, in 1979. For whatever reason, my parents, with their incredible taste in music, made sure I was at very important concerts at a very young age. ’It was like being in a room with a Buddha’īen Harper: I love Toots. Starkey (Ringo Starr’s son) also co-produced and performed on the album. In the weeks following his death, Vulture reached out to Toots’s friends, admirers, and musical collaborators - including Bonnie Raitt, Ben Harper, Ziggy Marley - and Trojan Jamaica founders Zak Starkey and Sshh Liguz, who released Toots’s last album Got to Be Tough on August 28, shortly before his passing. Hibbert was laid to rest October 15 at Saint Catherine Parish in Jamaica in a small, private funeral surrounded by his wife, children, and loved ones. While he never achieved the massive crossover appeal of peer and friend Bob Marley, Toots never stopped touring and making music until the literal end. In 1972, through the smoky haze of midnight screenings, the Jamaican crime film The Harder They Come, with its iconic soundtrack by star Jimmy Cliff and two tracks from Toots and the Maytals (“Sweet and Dandy,” “Pressure Drop”), broke reggae into the American consciousness.

Given the name “Little Toots” by an older brother, Hibbert became an early spokesman for social justice on tracks like “54-46 That’s My Number,” an anthem about a cop shakedown, penned in detention from a marijuana charge that left Toots behind bars for nine months. Born in May Pen, Jamaica, in 1942, the son of two Seventh-day Adventist preachers and the youngest of 14 children, Toots and his band The Maytals helped define the staccato, upbeat sound of ska, predating reggae by several years. When Toots Hibbert died last month, on September 11, the world lost not only one of the last living patriarchs of reggae (Toots was the first to use the word on his 1968 single “Do the Reggay”), but also a global ambassador - in life and song - for joy and positivity.

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