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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King Tubby

Engineer. Reggae, dub

Active
1968-1989
Sunrise
January 28, 1941, Kingston, Jamaica
Sunset
February 6, 1989, Duhaney Park, St. Andrew, Jamaica (life taken)
Also known as
King Tubby's, Osbourne Ruddock

Osbourne Ruddock, known as King Tubby, was an electronics engineer and mixing engineer, and the central figure in the invention of dub. He is the reason the remix exists as a form.

He grew up around High Holborn Street in central Kingston and moved to Waterhouse in 1955. He worked as a radio repairman, which in Kingston in the late 1950s meant repairing sound system equipment, since the island's weather and the sabotage rival operators practiced on each other kept the amplifiers failing. He built his own amplifiers, and by 1968 was running his own sound system, Tubby's Home Town Hi-Fi, whose sound quality and homemade echo and reverb units made it the most admired set in the city. U-Roy was its resident deejay, and the sound is where U-Roy's style was formed. I-Roy deejayed it when U-Roy was not available, and its treble horns, sometimes hung in the trees, and its reverb, which no rival set had, made it the sound the others had to answer.

In 1968 Tubby also began cutting discs for Duke Reid at Treasure Isle, which gave him access to the multitrack tapes. What he did with them, dropping the vocal, pushing the bass and drums forward, running instruments through echo and reverb and filters and returning them as fragments, was not editing but composition on the mixing board. His tools were as much his own as his ideas. Before he had a multitrack desk, he reshaped a mix by passing the signal through a bank of filters that blocked out the frequencies of the voice, the horns or the bass, a close cousin of graphic equalization, and it was the same rig he used on Home Town Hi-Fi to give the impression of live mixing in the dance. The practice of issuing a stripped instrumental on a record's B side had begun with Ruddy Redwood of Spanish Town, and Tubby was among the first to see that the version could be a piece of music in its own right rather than an accident.

In 1971 he opened his own studio at 18 Dromilly Avenue in Waterhouse, a small house with a converted bathroom for a vocal booth and equipment he had largely built himself. Producers brought him their tapes: Bunny Lee above all, and Lee Perry (Blackboard Jungle Dub), Augustus Pablo ("King Tubbys Meets Rockers Uptown," "Ital Dub"), Yabby You ("King Tubby's Prophecy of Dub"), Niney the Observer, Glen Brown, Larry Marshall, and Harry Mudie. His albums Dub from the Roots and The Roots of Dub reworked Lee's riddims, with their flying cymbals, and helped the dub album find an audience in Britain. The session players who worked the Bunny Lee riddims were billed as the Aggrovators, a working arrangement rather than a fixed band. He also ran his own labels, Firehouse, Kingston 11, Waterhouse, and Taurus.

The engineers who passed through the studio carried the method outward: Prince Jammy, who later recorded as King Jammy and is one man rather than two, Philip Smart, who took it to New York, and Scientist, who came in as a teenager. By the 1980s Tubby had largely stepped back from mixing and was working as a producer, and had built a new and larger studio, which opened in late 1985.

Early one morning, as he returned home from a session, his life was taken by a gunman outside his house on Sherlock Crescent in Duhaney Park. He was forty-eight. The killing is generally assumed to have been a robbery and has never been solved.

Last updated October 31, 2026

Connections

Notes

  1. The Rough Guide says dub "in the now familiar sense of radically remixed versions, arrived in 1972, and was largely the contribution of one man: Osbourne Ruddock, aka King Tubby." Steve Barrow and Peter Dalton, The Rough Guide to Reggae, 3rd ed. (London: Rough Guides, 2004), 215. Bradley calls his work on other producers' tapes "the genesis of the remix." Lloyd Bradley, This Is Reggae Music: The Story of Jamaica's Music (New York: Grove Press, 2001), 323.
  2. Bradley says his skill "led to him doing repair jobs or uprating for several studios and sound systems." Bradley, This Is Reggae Music, 314. The Rough Guide says he was often called to Duke Reid's Bond Street studio "to carry out repair work." Barrow and Dalton, Rough Guide to Reggae, 218.
  3. Bradley says the Home Town HiFi was "put together in 1968," was "probably the first to use high-frequency horn tweeters," and brought echo and reverb to the dance; Dennis Alcapone said he had never heard "another sound system that sound as nice as King Tubby's." Bradley, This Is Reggae Music, 314-15. The Rough Guide describes it at first as "a small sound system ... playing local parties" in Waterhouse, upgraded after Tubby heard Ruddy Redwood's versions in 1968, and by 1972 "one of the leading sound systems in Kingston." Barrow and Dalton, Rough Guide to Reggae, 218, 219.
  4. Bradley says U-Roy joined the Home Town HiFi as "number one deejay" when it was set up in 1968; the Rough Guide has him on the set by 1969. Bradley, This Is Reggae Music, 295; Barrow and Dalton, Rough Guide to Reggae, 218. The Rough Guide notes that I-Roy "deejayed King Tubby's Hi-Fi when U-Roy was not available." Barrow and Dalton, Rough Guide to Reggae, 229. Alcapone recalled Tubby's "steel horns for the treble" put "up in the trees," and that "no other sound system had reverb at the time." Bradley, This Is Reggae Music, 314. Once he applied reverb and echo to his exclusive instrumentals, Bradley says, the set "instantly became the number one sound in Kingston." Bradley, This Is Reggae Music, 315.
  5. Bradley: "Tubby worked for Duke Reid as a disc cutter and thus had access to Treasure Isle master tapes, from which he'd cut discs for his personal use specifically tailored for U-Roy's vocals." Bradley, This Is Reggae Music, 295.
  6. Bunny Lee told Bradley that Tubby "could make music outta the mistakes people bring him - like every spoil is a style to King Tubby," and that "if he mix the same tune a dozen times you will have twelve different version." Bradley, This Is Reggae Music, 316.
  7. Bradley, This Is Reggae Music, 316.
  8. Ruddy Redwood, quoted in the Rough Guide, recalls telling Duke Reid that "you can put the riddim on the other side." The Rough Guide dates the remix in Jamaica "as far back as 1967" and says Bunny Lee took Tubby to one of Ruddy's dances in Spanish Town in 1968. Barrow and Dalton, Rough Guide to Reggae, 215, 217, 218.
  9. The Rough Guide places his work in "the tiny studio at the back of his home" by 1972, says Bunny Lee brokered the purchase of Dynamic's old four-track board that year, and dates a second four-track machine, for voicing, to mid-1973. Barrow and Dalton, Rough Guide to Reggae, 219, 220. Bradley says the Dromilly Avenue yard was "his mum's house" and that the studio was "perpetually evolving" as he modified its equipment. Bradley, This Is Reggae Music, 317. Katz also credits Lee with "helping the sound engineer King Tubby to obtain an obsolete mixing desk," after which the "makeshift studio became the primary site" of dub. David Katz, "Bunny Lee Obituary," Guardian, October 9, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/oct/09/bunny-lee-obituary.
  10. Bradley names Glen Brown, Winston Riley, Lee Perry, Augustus Pablo, and Bunny Lee among his earliest remix customers, dates Blackboard Jungle Dub to 1973, and lists Yabby You, Niney, Jack Ruby, Harry Mudie's Meets King Tubby's in Dub Conference, and Pablo's King Tubby's Meets Rockers Uptown. Bradley, This Is Reggae Music, 316, 322-23. The Rough Guide credits his 1974 "Watergate Rock" for Larry Marshall's "I Admire You" with establishing his name. Barrow and Dalton, Rough Guide to Reggae, 220.
  11. Katz says the two albums "reworked many of Lee's rhythm tracks to dramatic effect, helping the dub album format to find a ready audience in Britain." Katz, "Bunny Lee Obituary." Elsewhere he says Tubby made "full use" of the flying cymbal on both, "honing in on the 'styling cymbals'" named in the liner notes of the first. 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.
  12. Bradley calls the Aggrovators "a shifting pool of session players" that included, "though not all at the same time," the Barrett brothers and Sly and Robbie. Bradley, This Is Reggae Music, 349. The Rough Guide calls them "a fluid line-up." Barrow and Dalton, Rough Guide to Reggae, 152.
  13. The Rough Guide names Prince Jammy, Prince Phillip Smart, and Scientist as his apprentices, says Smart was "emigrating to New York" when Jammy took his place, and gives Scientist's birth year as 1960. Barrow and Dalton, Rough Guide to Reggae, 215, 237, 238.
  14. The Rough Guide: "The studio eventually opened in late 1985, hitting almost immediately with one of his first productions, Anthony Red Rose's 'Tempo.'" Barrow and Dalton, Rough Guide to Reggae, 240.
  15. The Rough Guide: "King Tubby was gunned down in the early morning of February 6, 1989, outside his home in Duhaney Park, Kingston. The killer has never been found." Barrow and Dalton, Rough Guide to Reggae, 240.

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