Stanley Motta
Producer. Ska
- Active
- 1951-1950s
- Sunrise
- 1915
- Sunset
- 1993
- Also known as
- Stanley Beresford Brandon Motta, MRS, Motta's Recording Studio
Stanley Motta was the businessman who made the first commercial mento records, and with them the first records of Jamaican popular music to be sold on the island.
From a Sephardic Jewish family that ran a garage and motor-repair business, he had an electrical spares and appliance shop at 109 Harbour Street that also sold imported records, and by 1951 he had opened a small studio on Hanover Street. With no mastering or pressing plant in Jamaica, he used the London jazzman Bertie King's connections: masters of Harold Robinson and the Ticklers' "Don't Fence Her In" and "Glamour Girl" went to London to be pressed by Decca through Emil Shallit's Melodisc company, and the Ticklers' record, released in summer 1952, set the pattern for every 78 on his MRS label. He issued more than fifty titles, many with the pianist George Moxey, and recorded Lord Composer's "Hill & Gully Ride," later the source of a Justin Hinds hit. Many of the calypso and mento records were made as souvenirs for the tourist trade, and Motta sat on the Jamaica Tourist Board from 1955 to 1962. Roland Alphonso, Ernest Ranglin, Theophilus Beckford, Laurel Aitken and Lord Tanamo all played or sang on his sessions, and once Federal's pressing plant was meeting the demand he went back to concentrating on his shops.
Motta and Ken Khouri of Federal were the two most important commercial recording operators of the 1950s, uptown men who hired out their studios; Bradley notes that Motta even ran a door policy to restrict who could use his. Young singers paid to cut one-off discs there: Derrick Harriott and Claude Sang recorded "Lollipop Girl" at Motta's in 1956 and sold the acetate to a Maxfield Avenue sound system. He also imported records for American labels, a source for soundmen in Britain.
Last updated November 5, 2026
Connections
- Derrick Harriott (artist)
- Lord Tanamo (artist)
- Count Boysie (artist)
- Graeme Goodall (collaborator)
- Emil Shallit (collaborator)
Notes
- Steve Barrow and Peter Dalton, The Rough Guide to Reggae, 3rd ed. (London: Rough Guides, 2004), 7; Lloyd Bradley, This Is Reggae Music: The Story of Jamaica's Music (New York: Grove Press, 2001), 23, 24.
- Barrow and Dalton, Rough Guide to Reggae, 7. Bradley calls him "a true original sound-system owner and electrical goods store proprietor." Bradley, This Is Reggae Music, 22.
- Barrow and Dalton, Rough Guide to Reggae, 7, 8, 9. Augustyn names Lord Fly (Rupert Lyon) as the singer on Motta's first recordings in 1952, with Bertie King on clarinet. Heather Augustyn, "Stanley Motta, Recording Pioneer," SkaBook (blog), January 3, 2014, https://skabook.com/2014/01/03/stanley-motta-recording-pioneer/. In comments on Augustyn's post the scholar Daniel Neely says Motta's Lord Fly records were on sale by December 1950, and that Khouri and the radio station ZQI were recording before him. "Stanley Motta: Recording Pioneer," Skabook, January 3, 2014, https://skabook.com/2014/01/03/stanley-motta-recording-pioneer/.
- Augustyn, "Stanley Motta, Recording Pioneer," which also names Count Lasher, Lord Composer and Lord Melody among his calypsonians, the four-volume LP series "Authentic Jamaican Calypsos," and Rico Rodriguez's recollection that he too recorded for Motta. Augustyn gives his birth in Kingston on October 5, 1915, and dates the business to 1932.
- Bradley, This Is Reggae Music, 22, 25, 41.
- Derrick Harriott's account in Bradley, This Is Reggae Music, 40.
- Bradley, This Is Reggae Music, 119.
