Count Machuki
Artist. Ska, reggae
- Active
- 1950s-1970s
- Sunrise
- Kingston, Jamaica
- Sunset
- 1995
- Also known as
- Count Matchuki, Winston Cooper
Count Machuki was remembered as the first of the jive-talking Jamaican deejays, the master of ceremonies who announced the records, worked the crowd and drew up the blueprint for the deejay's verbal and physical showmanship.
He began in the 1950s as a dancer with Tom the Great Sebastian's sound on Luke Lane, drawing a crowd of his own, and rose to selector there. When Tom moved uptown to the Silver Slipper club he left Machuki behind, a street-sharp chatter thought too low-rent for the new crowd, and Coxsone Dodd took him on at Downbeat. There he added rhyme, jest and topical remarks ("Whether you're young or you're old, you just got to let the good times roll"), and learned how much power a deejay had over the dancers; he brought the young Prince Buster into the Downbeat operation as a protector, and called him "Wild Bill." He took on King Stitt as his second, the start of a lifelong partnership: "Count Matchuki took on to me because I could dance," Stitt said, and Machuki told him that if he could dance to those records he could make a good deejay.
Frustrated with Dodd, Machuki defected when Buster opened his own Voice of the People sound, and was its number one deejay when Buster launched "Oh Carolina." Buster called him "the pioneer of all Jamaican deejaying," the first to go along with the track rather than just talk on top of it. In 1969 he made deejay records for Joe Gibbs's Amalgamated label, Randy's and Coxsone, prototypes of the toasting that U-Roy, his natural successor in Bradley's view, made into a sustained run of hits. "Matchuki was a man I used to love to listen to," U-Roy said. "I used to say I'd like to be like this man."
Last updated November 5, 2026
Connections
- Coxsone Dodd (producer)
- Joe Gibbs (producer)
- King Stitt (mentee)
- Prince Buster (sound system)
- Tom the Great Sebastian (sound system)
Notes
- Steve Barrow and Peter Dalton, The Rough Guide to Reggae, 3rd ed. (London: Rough Guides, 2004), 12; Lloyd Bradley, This Is Reggae Music: The Story of Jamaica's Music (New York: Grove Press, 2001), 293.
- Bradley, This Is Reggae Music, 293. The Rough Guide says Machuki called Tom "a 'gentleman'." Barrow and Dalton, Rough Guide to Reggae, 14.
- Bradley, This Is Reggae Music, 31, 32, 293.
- King Stitt's account in Barrow and Dalton, Rough Guide to Reggae, 122. "King Stitt, the Man That Made Being a DJ Cool," Jamaica Gleaner, June 23, 2013, https://jamaica-gleaner.com/gleaner/20130623/ent/ent4.html.
- Bradley, This Is Reggae Music, 33, 57, 60, 293, 294.
- Bradley, This Is Reggae Music, 268, 295; "Count Machuki / Ansel Collins: Machuki's Cooking / Hot Buttered Corn," Discogs, accessed October 6, 2026, https://www.discogs.com/release/3323328; "Count Machuki / The Hippy Boys: Warfare," Discogs, accessed October 6, 2026, https://www.discogs.com/release/6347322; "Count Machuki / The Meditators: Call 1143," Discogs, accessed October 6, 2026, https://www.discogs.com/release/11125193. Bradley elsewhere says Machuki "never recorded" (294). U-Roy in "King Stitt, the Man That Made Being a DJ Cool."
