Aubrey Adams
Artist. Ska, rocksteady, reggae
- Active
- 1950s-1970s
- Sunrise
- June 17, 1920
- Sunset
- August 6, 1990, St. Andrew, Jamaica
- Also known as
- Aubrey Adams & His Dew Droppers, The Dewdroppers
Aubrey Adams was a pianist and organist whom the Rough Guide calls "enormously influential," one of the jazz-based players who became Coxsone Dodd's session musicians in the years before and during ska.
He was a regular in Clue J's Blues Blasters, the leading shuffle-boogie group of 1958 to 1961, alongside Ernest Ranglin, Roland Alphonso and Rico Rodriguez. Monty Alexander, who joined those sessions as a fourteen-year-old, remembered Adams as his hero: a pianist steeped in Erroll Garner, Nat King Cole and Oscar Peterson, with a way of voicing chords that showed real integrity amid the roots music going on around him. He played piano on Clancy Eccles's "Freedom," cut at Ken Khouri's studio in November 1959. He led a group at the Courtleigh Manor Hotel with Tommy McCook, and McCook's early ska side "Adams Apple" was cut for Dodd before the Skatalites formed. Gladstone Anderson, Duke Reid's pianist, was his nephew.
In the rocksteady years he played organ on Bobby Aitken's instrumental sets, and later Sonia Pottinger had him and Ernest Ranglin play jazz over tapes of drummers she had recorded, among them Count Ossie. The Rough Guide lists his band, Aubrey Adams and the Dewdroppers, among the early session outfits, and Wikipedia gives his dates as 1920 to 1990.
Last updated November 1, 2026
Connections
- Gladstone Anderson (nephew)
- Tommy McCook (bandmate)
- Ernest Ranglin (bandmate)
- Roland Alphonso (bandmate)
- Clue J (bandmate)
- Coxsone Dodd (session work)
- Sonia Pottinger (session work)
- Clancy Eccles (session work)
- Bobby Aitken (session work)
Notes
- Steve Barrow and Peter Dalton, The Rough Guide to Reggae, 3rd ed. (London: Rough Guides, 2004), 24, 49.
- Barrow and Dalton, Rough Guide to Reggae, 24.
- Alexander's account in Barrow and Dalton, Rough Guide to Reggae, 24.
- Eccles's account in Barrow and Dalton, Rough Guide to Reggae, 109.
- Barrow and Dalton, Rough Guide to Reggae, 37.
- Barrow and Dalton, Rough Guide to Reggae, 64.
- Barrow and Dalton, Rough Guide to Reggae, 83; Pottinger's account in Barrow and Dalton, Rough Guide to Reggae, 81.
- Barrow and Dalton, Rough Guide to Reggae, 24, which spells it "Dudroppers"; "Aubrey Adams," Wikipedia, accessed October 6, 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aubrey_Adams (thinly sourced).
