By Frederick R. Dannaway (Riddim Magazine, May/June 2012)Herb for my wine, honey for my strong drink Bob MarleyI’m drinkin’ rum and Red Bull Beenie ManThe prehistoric, serendipitous discovery of alcohol forever changed what it meant to be human. It was a consequence of water leaking into storage pits surrounded by walls to protect food surpluses that evolved into the town and city. Some radical scholars speculate that agriculture developed, not for mono-crop food cultures, but for grains easily harvested and suitable for brewing beer. When wild yeasts conspired with rain to invade grain surplus, or when wild fruits and water spontaneously fermented, the effects were warming, relaxing and stimulating and generally beneficent if not taken to excess. Cultures and religions have been debating ever since the merits of substances potent enough to be called “spirits.” Islam banned alcohol while Christians drank of it as a sacrament symbolizing the blood of Christ. Zen lunatics praise sake and plum wine in poems and Tibetan Buddhists have a “beer of enlightenment” and wine and cordials rendered moods philosophic in Grecian intellectual circles of Plato and Aristotle.
But distilled spirits, as fire-water, decimated Native-Americans and Temperance leagues in America prohibited drinking, declaring it as a sure path to damnation and ruination of moral values. The social toll of drinking, from accidents and domestic abuse to rape and violent crimes to ill health and deformed babies, seems to be immense. Alcoholics drown not only themselves but their families and anyone who ever loves them in a sea of neurologically dependent despair.
The incremental suicide has cost the world many of its most talented, though the dysfunction and creativity may have been inextricably linked, as with Joseph Hill and Delroy Wilson, both whose lives were cut short by heavy periods of drinking.Jamaica, particularly, is bound up with a darker side of alcohol of the slave trade that operated in the “Rum Triangle.” The farming of sugar is labor intensive, as was the boiling of the sugar for the rum, a dangerous process that burned the slaves charged with stirring. The scalding liquid burned slaves to the point that they had to be replaced about every four hours in an assembly line like process called the “Jamaican Train.” The word rum, etymologically contested, probably derived from such words as rumbullion or rumbustion which denoted “an uproar or fighting” as in the scuffles and brawls instigated in Caribbean tippling houses, which were the prototype of the first bars and saloons. It was also called Kill-Devil, either for the wicked hangover or medicinally as in, to kill a devil or disease. As Marley sung, “Old Pirates yes them rob I, take I in their merchant ship” and it was the blood profits for the taste of sugar and rum that brought Africans to the Caribbean.
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Historians note that prior to the conquest by Europeans, the peaceful Arawak used to gently ferment cassava for a pleasantly intoxicating beer. After forced into unbelievably savage slavery, many would drink the raw, cyanide-rich cassava juice to escape their captors by suicide.Music and alcohol have always been kindred spirits from blues and jazz to the drunken harmonies of Palm wine music. African guitarists were synonymous with alcohol and in the country the singers would be paid in palm wine. It’s hard to imagine soca without rum, and the rum anthems far outnumber the ganjah tunes in most of the surrounding islands.
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Early reggae songs championed indigenous rum as did many early mento and calypso tunes.