World of Jamaican Music

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

Remembering Derrick Harriott (1939-2026), rocksteady singer and producer. Read his story →

Bobby Ellis

Artist. Ska, rocksteady, reggae, dub

Active
1950s-2016
Sunrise
1932, Kingston
Sunset
October 18, 2016, Kingston
Also known as
Robert Ellis

Bobby Ellis was a trumpeter and horn arranger, a product of the Alpha Boys School, whose playing runs through two decades of Jamaican records, from Studio One and the Black Ark to Burning Spear's Marcus Garvey.

He studied trumpet at Alpha alongside a generation of horn players that included Tommy McCook, Headley Bennett, Vin Gordon and Don Drummond. By the late 1960s he was in the Studio One house band at Brentford Road, part of a horn section with Headley Bennett, Val Bennett, Cedric Brooks and Vin Gordon, and he played on records such as Higgs and Wilson's "There's a Reward for Me" and Bob Andy's "I've Got to Go Back Home," for which he said he wrote the horn arrangement. He had already arranged for the Mighty Vikings. "I'm really a background man," he said in 2007, one who liked to support the front runners, and he thought keyboards too mechanical to replace horns: "A hornsman really knows how to get the soul out of his instrument."

In the 1970s he was everywhere. He played in the horn sections that Lee Perry used for the Upsetters' records and at the Black Ark, and in Bunny Lee's Aggrovators, where he was one of the soloists featured on instrumental albums. With Richard Hall, Herman Marquis and Vin Gordon he made up the horns on Burning Spear's Jack Ruby productions, and he arranged the horns for "Marcus Garvey" and "Slavery Days"; he stayed in Spear's recording and touring band for twelve years. He and Tommy McCook played and arranged the horns on Bunny Wailer's Blackheart Man (1976), and their partnership was the subject of the Yabby You-produced album Blazing Horns. His recut of "Shank I Sheck" with the Revolutionaries, for Sonia Pottinger, became a dancehall staple, and Ranking Joe's deejay version of it was a big hit. He also played on the flautist Herbie Mann's Reggae albums. In 1975 he led the Port Antonio band Young Experience, with Junior Murvin out front; it was close enough to Michael Manley's government to be sent on a tour of Cuba.

He was made an Officer of the Order of Distinction in 2014. He departed at the University Hospital of the West Indies aged eighty-four; the cause was an illness related to pneumonia.

Last updated November 4, 2026

Connections

Notes

  1. Lloyd Bradley, This Is Reggae Music: The Story of Jamaica's Music (New York: Grove Press, 2001), 101. On Marcus Garvey: Steve Barrow and Peter Dalton, The Rough Guide to Reggae, 3rd ed. (London: Rough Guides, 2004), 146; Howard Campbell, "Trumpeter Bobby Ellis Dies at Age 84," Trinidad Express, accessed October 6, 2026, https://trinidadexpress.com/features/trumpeter-bobby-ellis-dies-at-age-84/article_a7795288-c84b-58c0-bdd6-20bfeedca71f.html.
  2. Bradley, This Is Reggae Music, 101; Campbell, "Trumpeter Bobby Ellis Dies at Age 84."
  3. Bradley, This Is Reggae Music, 214; Campbell, "Trumpeter Bobby Ellis Dies at Age 84." The Bob Andy title is given there as "I Wanna Go Back Home."
  4. "Bobby Ellis: Tour & Taxis," Rebelbase, April 22, 2007, https://rebelbase.be/interviews/detail/bobby-ellis---tour--taxis-042007. No source found describes his tone in detail; the Observer calls him "prolific, low-key and talented": "Passage: Bobby Ellis," Jamaica Observer, December 16, 2016, https://www.jamaicaobserver.com/2016/12/16/passage-bobby-ellis/.
  5. Barrow and Dalton, Rough Guide to Reggae, 154 (the Aggrovators), 176 (the Upsetters); Bradley, This Is Reggae Music, 326 (the Black Ark), 349 (the Aggrovators).
  6. Barrow and Dalton, Rough Guide to Reggae, 146; Campbell, "Trumpeter Bobby Ellis Dies at Age 84."
  7. Campbell, "Trumpeter Bobby Ellis Dies at Age 84." The Rough Guide calls Blazing Horns a showcase for "the enduring partnership of tenorman Tommy McCook and trumpeter Bobby Ellis." Barrow and Dalton, Rough Guide to Reggae, 167.
  8. Barrow and Dalton, Rough Guide to Reggae, 189 ("similarly massive, and very influential"), 262. The High Note single is dated 1978 on Discogs. "Bobby Ellis / Revolutionaries: Shank I Sheck / Shank I Dub," Discogs, accessed October 6, 2026, https://www.discogs.com/release/3342509-Bobby-Ellis-Revolutionaries-Shank-I-Sheck-Shank-I-Dub.
  9. Campbell, "Trumpeter Bobby Ellis Dies at Age 84."
  10. Katz: Murvin "returned to Port Antonio in 1975 fronting Young Experience, led by the trumpeter Bobby Ellis," a group "close to the socialist-leaning prime minister Michael Manley, who arranged for them to tour Cuba." David Katz, "Junior Murvin Obituary," Guardian, December 3, 2013, https://www.theguardian.com/music/2013/dec/03/junior-murvin.
  11. Campbell, "Trumpeter Bobby Ellis Dies at Age 84." Discogs gives his birth date as July 2, 1932, in Kingston. "Bobby Ellis," Discogs, accessed October 6, 2026, https://www.discogs.com/artist/317009-Bobby-Ellis.

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