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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Bunny "Striker" Lee

Producer. Rocksteady, reggae, dub

Active
1967-2020
Sunrise
August 23, 1941, Kingston, Jamaica
Sunset
October 6, 2020, Kingston, Jamaica
Also known as
The Aggrovators, Bunny Lee, Edward O’Sullivan Lee

Edward O'Sullivan Lee produced thousands of Jamaican records across five decades, in every style from rocksteady to digital dancehall. Bradley counts him among "rocksteady and reggae's truly innovative producers," and the Rough Guide says that while Bob Marley was broadening reggae's audience, Lee's productions dominated the Jamaican dancehalls.

He got the nickname Striker from football and entered the business in the early 1960s as a record plugger, learning radio promotion and distribution before he ever produced anything. He began producing in 1967, and the organ shuffle he put on Stranger Cole and Lester Sterling's "Bangarang" helped define the emerging reggae sound. He had no studio of his own until the 1980s and no permanent house band, instead hiring rooms and musicians as needed. The arrangement gave him flexibility and meant his sound depended on whoever he had booked, most often the players he billed as the Aggrovators, or the Soul Syndicate. In 1968 he went to London, where Island issued the compilation Leaping with Mr. Lee and he licensed records to Trojan and Pama; Max Romeo's "Wet Dream" spent twenty-six weeks in the British charts in 1969 despite a BBC ban.

The Aggrovators were never a fixed group. The name described a working arrangement, and many of the same musicians recorded as the Revolutionaries at Channel One and as the Impact All-Stars at Randy's, taking whatever name the session called for. Across the 1970s the roster included Aston and Carlton Barrett, Robbie Shakespeare, Carlton "Santa" Davis, Tony Chin, Earl "Chinna" Smith, Bernard "Touter" Harvey, and the horn players Tommy McCook and Vin Gordon.

The peak was the first half of the 1970s, with hits for Delroy Wilson, John Holt, Slim Smith, Johnny Clarke, and Cornell Campbell. Wilson's "Better Must Come" (1971) was adopted by Michael Manley's People's National Party for the 1972 election campaign; though he tried to stay out of politics, he was later shot in the hand in an attack over a satirical record he had produced, Bill Gentles's "Take the Rod from Our Backs." The "flying cymbal," an open-and-closed hi-hat pattern that Santa Davis played on Johnny Clarke's "None Shall Escape the Judgement" in 1974 and that Lee named and put on record after record, dominated reggae that year and the next. Lee had Davis develop it in answer to the "Philly bump" of American soul, and it gave its name to a dance, done with a flying motion of the arms in time to the hi-hat.

Money shaped the method. Because he had to buy studio time, it paid to use each riddim more than once and to have the musicians redo Studio One and Treasure Isle riddims they already knew. In making that a common practice, the Rough Guide says, he anticipated Channel One, Joe Gibbs, and the dancehall revolution of the next decade, and his Johnny Clarke, fitting fresh lyrics onto the recuts, could be called the first dancehall singer in the modern sense.

He helped King Tubby obtain an obsolete mixing desk, and the arrangement that followed was consistent: Lee would cut a riddim, often a reworking of a Studio One or Treasure Isle rocksteady hit, and send the tape to Tubby's mixing room in Waterhouse. The results, issued on B-sides and then on albums, made Tubby's studio the main home of dub, on records that reworked many of Lee's riddims; the various King Tubby Meets the Aggrovators albums are filed under Tubby's name. Lee was also among the first producers to see the potential of using the same riddim again and again, for a vocal, a deejay cut, an instrumental, and a dub, and an early champion of deejays such as U-Roy.

He adapted to digital production in the 1980s by hiring people who understood the equipment while continuing to select material and promote it himself, and he kept working when most of his contemporaries had stopped.

Katz remembered a gregarious, flamboyant figure with "an innate feel for a hit" and a "cavalier approach to business," who mentored the producers Niney the Observer, Prince Jammy, Yabby You, and Ossie Thomas. He received the Order of Distinction in 2008, and departed in Jamaica in October 2020.

Last updated November 4, 2026

Connections

Notes

  1. Bradley calls him "one of rocksteady and reggae's truly innovative producers": Lloyd Bradley, This Is Reggae Music: The Story of Jamaica's Music (New York: Grove Press, 2001), 160. Barrow and Dalton credit him with the mid-1970s "flying cymbals" sound, which he had drummer Carlton "Santa" Davis develop in 1974, and say his updating of old rhythms "anticipated not only the approaches of Channel One and Joe Gibbs, but the dancehall revolution of the next decade": Steve Barrow and Peter Dalton, The Rough Guide to Reggae, 3rd ed. (London: Rough Guides, 2004), 152. Katz says he "produced thousands of reggae tracks": David Katz, "Bunny Lee Obituary," Guardian, October 9, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/oct/09/bunny-lee-obituary. On the dancehalls, Barrow and Dalton, Rough Guide to Reggae, 153.
  2. Bradley says that "during the first half of the 1960s" Lee worked as a record promotions man for Duke Reid and then Ken Lack's Caltone: Bradley, This Is Reggae Music, 160. Barrow and Dalton call him "a former record plugger for both Reid and Kong": Barrow and Dalton, Rough Guide to Reggae, 76. Wikipedia dates his start with Reid to 1962 and his first hit as a producer, Roy Shirley's "Music Field," to 1967: "Bunny Lee," Wikipedia, accessed October 1, 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Striker_Lee. Katz says Lee, the first of ten children of a Greenwich Farm shoemaker, studied electrical engineering, worked in motor parts, and plugged ska records for Reid, Dodd, Kong and Prince Buster on the radio show "Teenage Dance Party"; he was fired from his garage job in 1967 for promoting Desmond Dekker's "Unity," and his first production, Roy Shirley's "Music Field," was cut in free studio time from Reid. Katz, "Bunny Lee Obituary."
  3. Katz, "Bunny Lee Obituary."
  4. Barrow and Dalton note that he "did not have his own studio but had to buy time" at Randy's and Channel One: Barrow and Dalton, Rough Guide to Reggae, 152. Bradley adds Harry J's and describes the "tiny studio" Lee acquired in the 1980s: Bradley, This Is Reggae Music, 350. Wikipedia says he bought Joe Gibbs's studio in Duhaney Park in the early 1980s: "Bunny Lee," Wikipedia.
  5. Barrow and Dalton call the Aggrovators "a fluid line-up": Barrow and Dalton, Rough Guide to Reggae, 152-53.
  6. Katz, "Bunny Lee Obituary."
  7. Bradley's roster of the Aggrovators includes the Barrett brothers, Sly Dunbar and Robbie Shakespeare, Lloyd Parkes, Santa Davis, McCook, Vin Gordon, Bobby Ellis, Bernard Harvey, Chinna Smith, and others "though not all at the same time": Bradley, This Is Reggae Music, 349-50. Barrow and Dalton add Tony Chin on rhythm guitar: Barrow and Dalton, Rough Guide to Reggae, 153.
  8. On Lee's hits of 1969-73, including Slim Smith, John Holt, Delroy Wilson, and Cornell Campbell, Barrow and Dalton, Rough Guide to Reggae, 103; on Johnny Clarke and Campbell in the mid-1970s, 152-53. Bradley notes that by the mid-1970s the Lee and Joe Gibbs labels "had replaced the former Big Two of Studio One and Treasure Isle": Bradley, This Is Reggae Music, 349.
  9. Barrow and Dalton call "Better Must Come" "election-winning" and date it to 1971: Barrow and Dalton, Rough Guide to Reggae, 103. Katz says that although Lee "tried to follow an apolitical stance," he was later shot in the hand in an attack provoked by Bill Gentles's satirical "Take the Rod from Our Backs," which he had produced. Katz, "Bunny Lee Obituary."
  10. The drummer Santa Davis's account, with Johnny Clarke's, in David Katz, "The (Not So Clear-Cut) History of the Flying Cymbal," Red Bull Music Academy Daily, July 31, 2013, https://daily.redbullmusicacademy.com/2013/07/flying-cymbal-feature. Davis says he adapted it from MFSB's "TSOP" and that Lee "was the one who name it 'flying cymbal'"; Katz notes earlier precedents that "made fleeting impact." Katz's obituary credits Lee with introducing the style, which "dominated the reggae scene in 1974-75." Katz, "Bunny Lee Obituary."
  11. Barrow and Dalton, Rough Guide to Reggae, 152.
  12. Barrow and Dalton, Rough Guide to Reggae, 152.
  13. Lee recalled arranging for Tubby to buy Dynamic Studios' old four-track board, the start of King Tubby's as a multitrack studio: Bradley, This Is Reggae Music, 316. Katz likewise credits Lee with "helping the sound engineer King Tubby to obtain an obsolete mixing desk." Katz, "Bunny Lee Obituary."
  14. On King Tubby Meets the Aggrovators at Dub Station, Bradley, This Is Reggae Music, 323.
  15. Katz calls him an early champion of deejay styles, with hits featuring U-Roy and others: Katz, "Bunny Lee Obituary." Barrow and Dalton count him "among the first producers to realize the potential of using the same rhythm tracks time and time again": Barrow and Dalton, Rough Guide to Reggae, 153.
  16. Wikipedia says that after buying his studio he "continued producing, albeit on a less prolific basis than in the 1970s": "Bunny Lee," Wikipedia.
  17. Katz, "Bunny Lee Obituary."
  18. On his death on October 6, 2020, at seventy-nine, Nick Reilly, "Legendary Reggae Producer Bunny Lee Has Died Aged 79," NME, October 7, 2020, https://www.nme.com/news/music/bunny-lee-legendary-reggae-producer-has-died-aged-79-2774873. Katz notes the Order of Distinction in 2008. Katz, "Bunny Lee Obituary."

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