World of Jamaican Music

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An illustrated map of the creators of Jamaican music and how they are connected.

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Beres Hammond

Artist. Reggae, dancehall, roots

Active
1975-present
Sunrise
1955
Also known as
Beres, Hugh Beresford Hammond, Beresford Hammond, Harmony House

Beres Hammond is a soul singer who, after a decade as Jamaica's leading balladeer, became in the digital era what the Rough Guide calls "Jamaica's greatest contemporary singer," as much at home with roots as with the most anguished love song.

He was the ninth of ten children and from about the age of nine spent weekends with his sisters in Kingston, haunting the record shops; Alton Ellis, Ken Boothe, Marvin Gaye, Sam Cooke and Otis Redding were his models. Clancy Eccles, a friend of the family, recorded him at eleven or twelve, though the song stayed unreleased for decades. A talent show run by Winston Blake's Merritone sound gave him his first crowd, and in 1975 the guitarist Dwight Pinkney brought him into Zap Pow as lead singer.

His solo album Soul Reggae, made with the guitarist and arranger Willie Lindo at Aquarius, produced "One Step Ahead" and cast him as a balladeer; he left Zap Pow in 1979. He moved on to Joe Gibbs for Just a Man, then to Dynamic Sounds, without seeing royalties, and started producing himself. His own "Groovy Little Thing" and Lindo's production of "What One Dance Can Do," cut at Dynamic with Sly Dunbar on drums, were among the biggest Jamaican hits of 1985; Audrey Hall's answer record, "One Dance Won't Do," was a British pop hit for Donovan Germain.

In the late 1980s gunmen broke into his house, tied up the household and threatened to kill him; he spent most of the next years in New York and stopped working. His biggest single for Tappa Zukie, "Putting Up Resistance," came from the same years. What brought him back was a deal with Germain in 1990: studio time at Penthouse in return for a song on Germain's riddim. The song was "Tempted to Touch," Germain's best-seller of the year, built on John Holt's "A Love I Can Feel," and the start of a run of Penthouse records with Hammond that the Rough Guide calls the high ground of Jamaican vocal music in the 1990s. The idea behind them, the Rough Guide explains, was to set Jamaica's top soul stylist over dancehall riddims, and A Love Affair, with each track given time and care by Mafia and Fluxy, Steely and Clevie and the Firehouse Crew, established him as the major vocalist of the digital age. It places him with Gregory Isaacs, Dennis Brown and Freddie McGregor among the singers equally at home in anguished romance and deep roots, and notes that he never stretched his talent as thin as many of his peers. Hammond himself calls his songs his children and says that close observation of people is his recipe for writing one. He also recorded for Fatis Burrell's Xterminator, including "Full Attention," and for Star Trail; Elektra issued one album in 1994 and dropped him.

His Harmony House label and studio, in the basement of his house in Stony Hill, recorded Dennis Brown, Luciano and an early Sizzla, and produced much of Jah Cure's early work, including "Kings in the Jungle" with Sizzla. "They Gonna Talk" and "Don't Play with My Heart" were among his biggest hits in 2000, and the album that followed, Music Is Life (2001), with Wyclef Jean on "Dance 4 Me," became his best seller in the United States.

Last updated November 1, 2026

Connections

Notes

  1. Steve Barrow and Peter Dalton, The Rough Guide to Reggae, 3rd ed. (London: Rough Guides, 2004), 320.
  2. David Katz, "Beres Hammond: Soul Survivor," Caribbean Beat, no. 55 (May/June 2002), https://www.caribbean-beat.com/issue-55/beres-hammond-soul-survivor.
  3. Katz, "Beres Hammond." The Rough Guide notes "an early taste (circa 1972)" of him on a Clancy Eccles compilation. Barrow and Dalton, Rough Guide to Reggae, 110. The Rough Guide gives his birthplace as Kingston; Hammond told Katz he was born in Annotto Bay. Barrow and Dalton, Rough Guide to Reggae, 320.
  4. Katz, "Beres Hammond." Howard Campbell, "What One Dance Did for Beres," Jamaica Observer, April 18, 2015, https://jamaicaobserver.com/2015/04/17/what-one-dance-did-for-beres. Katz lists Soul Reggae as 1977, Campbell as 1978.
  5. Katz, "Beres Hammond." Campbell, "What One Dance Did for Beres." Barrow and Dalton, Rough Guide to Reggae, 312, 320. Katz quotes Hammond that Hall's record "reached number two in the British charts."
  6. Katz, "Beres Hammond."
  7. Barrow and Dalton, Rough Guide to Reggae, 320. Katz dates the album Putting Up Resistance to 1989.
  8. Katz, "Beres Hammond." Barrow and Dalton, Rough Guide to Reggae, 313, 318, 320.
  9. Barrow and Dalton, Rough Guide to Reggae, 320.
  10. "The Man, the Magic, the Music," Sunday Gleaner, October 7, 2018, via PressReader, https://www.pressreader.com/jamaica/jamaica-gleaner/20181007/282690458141646.
  11. Barrow and Dalton, Rough Guide to Reggae, 320, 362; Howard Campbell, "The 'Fattis' Legacy: Reflections on the Work of a Maestro," Jamaica Observer, December 9, 2011, https://www.jamaicaobserver.com/2011/12/08/the-fattis-legacy-reflections-on-the-work-of-a-maestro/. Katz, "Beres Hammond."
  12. Katz, "Beres Hammond." Barrow and Dalton, Rough Guide to Reggae, 357, 378.
  13. Barrow and Dalton, Rough Guide to Reggae, 320; Katz, "Beres Hammond."

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