Today's record is one of my rarer ones - 'High Society' by Pat Francis, aka Jah Lloyd. It's from the Rupie Edwards stable, features that really beautiful guitar that we often find on his productions, and is a straight vocal rather than a deejay tune. Jah Lloyd seems to have been a singer in the same way that Big Youth was (check out his versions of 'Second That Emotion' and 'To Be A Lover') - not much technique, but a whole bucket of soul.
The lyrics are paricularly sad in the light of this Blood & Fire post from a journalist who interviewed him for 'The Beat' magazine a year or so before his death in the mid-nineties: "He died from poverty basically. He was a little tiny guy and had severe asthma, I doubt he had access to proper medicine much less the money to pay for it. He lived rough, no fixed place to live, no money for food. His body was found in some park where he'd been living."
