General Echo
Artist. Dancehall, reggae
- Active
- 1977-1980
- Sunrise
- December 8, 1955, Kingston, Jamaica
- Sunset
- November 1980, Kingston
- Also known as
- Ranking Slackness, Earl Anthony Robinson, Earl Robinson
General Echo (Earl Anthony Robinson) was the deejay who took "slackness," sexually explicit lyrics long heard in the dancehall, onto record, and whose delivery the Rough Guide judges the most original and influential since Big Youth's.
He built his name on top sounds, Gemini, Stereophonic and Ray Symbolic among them, and with Ranking Joe, Brigadier Jerry and the Lone Ranger he was one of the deejays who brought back the U-Roy style and served as models for Yellowman and the next wave. In 1979 Winston Riley released The Slackest LP, the album that began the trend; 12 Inches of Pleasure, produced mostly by Henry "Junjo" Lawes, followed. Bradley sets him beside the Lone Ranger as "the first green shoots of a radical deejay rethink," Echo "favouring bawdy humour over righteous teachings." He did record cleaner material: "Arleen," over Riley's "Stalag 17" riddim, was a Jamaican number one, and the kung fu-inspired "Drunken Master" was made for George Phang. Lucy Sante heard in "Arleen" a delivery "mostly talkover, with just a bit of sing-song at the end of the verse," and called it "suggestive, seductive, hypnotic, light-footed." Papa Michigan, who grew up with him in Allman Town, remembered a calm, soft-spoken man and said, "All a dem deejay who do slackness learn from Echo."
In November 1980 his life was taken by the police, who stopped the car he was riding in and shot him, Leon "Big John" Johns, owner of the Stereophonic sound, and the selector Flux. No satisfactory explanation has ever been given. Clint Eastwood and General Saint's first record together was a tribute to him.
Last updated November 5, 2026
Connections
- Henry "Junjo" Lawes (producer)
- Winston Riley (producer)
- George Phang (producer)
- Sister Nancy (same sound system)
Notes
- Steve Barrow and Peter Dalton, The Rough Guide to Reggae, 3rd ed. (London: Rough Guides, 2004), 254-55.
- Barrow and Dalton, Rough Guide to Reggae, 188, 248, 254.
- Barrow and Dalton, Rough Guide to Reggae, 254-55, 285; Lloyd Bradley, This Is Reggae Music: The Story of Jamaica's Music (New York: Grove Press, 2001), 505.
- Bradley, This Is Reggae Music, 480.
- Barrow and Dalton, Rough Guide to Reggae, 117, 254, 280, 303. Sante dates "Arleen" to the autumn of 1979. Lucy Sante, "Arleen," New York Review of Books, March 25, 2015, https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2015/03/25/arleen/.
- Sante, "Arleen."
- Howard Campbell, "Remembering General Echo," Clinton Lindsay, November 23, 2020, https://clintonlindsay.com/2020/11/23/remembering-general-echo.
- Barrow and Dalton, Rough Guide to Reggae, 254. Wikipedia gives the date as November 22, 1980, and his birth date as December 8, 1955. "General Echo," Wikipedia, accessed October 7, 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Echo. Campbell also gives November 22 and says the case has never been resolved. Campbell, "Remembering General Echo."
- Barrow and Dalton, Rough Guide to Reggae, 270.
