The Wailing Souls
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The Wailing Souls are a Jamaican reggae vocal group still recording and performing live, with a history going back to the 1960's. They have recorded with many top Jamaican producers including Coxsone Dodd of studio one, Lloyd "King Jammy" James, Henry "Junjo" Lawes, Delroy Wright and Freddie McGregor, as well as some early recordings at Bob Marley's Tuff Gong. The group is perhaps best known for two classic roots reggae songs, "War" and "Bredda Gravalicious" as well as the more pop influenced "All Over The World". The album "Firehouse Rock" and its title track was one of their early 1980's successes. The band has recorded cover versions of a wide variety of songs, such as Kate and Anna McGarrigle's "Heartbeats Accelerating", The Who's "My Generation" , the Beatles "Tomorrow never knows" and Bob Dylan's "Like a rolling stone" . They also did a song for the soundtrack of the animated motion picture "Titan A.E.".
The group has seen many lineup changes but the two singers always present are Winston "pipe" Matthews and Lloyd "bread" MacDonald. Known as Pipe and Bread they have worked with Sly and Robbie, the Roots Radics, Lloyd Parks and many other great reggae musicians. In 2006 they released "Classic Jamaican Flava", a 2 disc set featuring an audio disc and DVD of a live performance in San Francisco. Their vocal style, as well as many jamaican harmony singers of their era is known to be heavily influenced by motown, perhaps because of the radio exposure of motown music in jamaica during the 1950's and 1960's.
