Rediscovering Burning Spear's Man in the Hills Eric Doumerc It is 26 years since Burning Spear's Man in the Hills was released in Jamaica and in Europe. This album came at a crucial time in Burning Spear's career as the singer was becoming increasingly popular in Great Britain and was turning into a media star. Winston Rodney had started singing in 1969 and had released two Studio One LPs ( Presenting Burning Spear and Rocking Time) which had met with only moderate success in Jamaica. Indeed, as pointed out by Steve Barrow in his Rough Guide, Spear's style was so removed from the reggae mainstream that only Clement Dodd had taken a gamble on his music. After his Studio One days, Spear teamed up with two back-up singers, Delroy Hines and Rupert Willington, to record the epochal Marcus Garvey LP with the producer Jack Ruby, an LP which was very successful both in Jamaica and in Europe on account of two gripping songs, "Marcus Garvey"and "Slavery Days". These songs were important protest songs which delved into Jamaica's slave past and praised one of the first black nationalist leaders at a time when it was far from fashionable to do so. The Marcus Garvey LP and its dub counterpart ( Garvey's Ghost) made Burning Spear very popular in Britain where the black British community was facing racism and discrimination from the police forces and with students. But what is quite striking is that after the runaway success of that LP, Spear made an LP which adopted a different approach, a different "style". This LP, Man in the Hills, constitutes a thematic and stylistic whole and it differs greatly from the Marcus Garvey LP. What we propose to do in this short piece is to show that this LP could be seen as representing a kind of return to his Jamaican roots for Burning Spear and a defense of moral values set in a rural setting. Back to roots: In the title track of the Man in the Hills LP, Spear lays the stress on a rural life style away from the corrupting influence of the city of Kingston. In Jamaica the hills symbolize resistance to slavery and the alternative life style chosen by the ex-slaves after the slavery period. Indeed whenever they ran away, the slaves headed for the hills and after emancipation the ex-slaves founded "free villages" in the hills. Right from the opening lines of the title track, the emphasis is laid on the necessity to "live up in the hills": Back-up singers: "And if we should live up in the hills. Spear: " My brother go, go to the river To carry the water My sister wash up the dishes And even goes to the shop And bringing the groceries When my brother run around And pick up the bramble To keep the fire blazing, Blazing fire, fire !" These lines describe a very simple but hard way of life and what is remarkable is that there is no glamorization of the rural life style. In fact, Spear insists on the back-breaking tasks that Jamaicans have to perform every day to get water, food,etc. In "Man in the Hills", Rodney describes a typical day in the life of ordinary Jamaicans in a village that could be one of the "free villages" founded after full Emancipation in 1838. These free villages became the embodiment of the Jamaican peasantry's sturdy independence and hard-earned freedom. In "Lion", Spear deals with the survival of Rastafarian culture in Jamaica as the Biblical Lion of Judah is a powerful Rastafarian symbol that sends back both to the titles Ras Tafari adopted on his coronation and to the ideas of strength and resilience: "Don't kill him ! Don't kill the lion ! Don't kill him !". Moral values: The Man in the Hills LP is also characterized by the presence of certain key ideas and values that keep on recurring in Spear's songs. For instance the song entitled "It is Good" lays the stress on the notion of independence of mind or freedom from mental slavery as Bob Marley would say. The chorus goes "It is good when a man can think for himself" and contains the gist of Spear's argument: in post-colonial Jamaica ( in 1976,when the song was released Jamaica had been independent for ten years) the shackles of mental slavery have not yet been removed and Jamaicans must learn to think for themselves.The opening lines of the song consist of a proverb which is addressed to Spear's listeners: " All who have ears will hear, and all who have eyes will see. They will see and they will hear". In other songs like "Children", Spear deals with a very important theme, that is self- knowledge. In that song the metaphor of sea-bathing is resorted to and the persona in the song keeps asking the children to come back to shore as the "current is too strong" and it is too dangerous to swim. The song reads like a cautionary tale about the danger of swimming too far from the shore and being drowned. One tantalizing interpretation for that sea-bathing symbolism is that it is necessary to know oneself before "swimming too far from the shore" otherwise one runs the risk of being overtaken by many dangers. The moral values defended by Spear are obviously Rastafarian values and this appears through songs like "Door Peep", a new version of one of Burning Spear's most famous Studio One tracks. In this song, Spear exhorts his listeners to "chant down Babylon" and warns that no pagan "shall enter this hola land". Other values include peace and harmony, two key Rastafarian values. The song "No More War" was obviously inspired by the internecine warfare that was raging in the Kingston slums in the mid-1970's and Rodney clearly voices his indignation at so much blood being shed: - " Night and day bomb a-explode - Too much youths are dead - Whose fault ? - That's the question I ask !" These lines are a clear indication that Spear's retreat into the hills did not mean that he ignored recent developments on the island and show that he was deeply troubled by these developments. So it could be said that Man in the Hills is characterized by a tension between the pull of the hills and the alternative/rural lifestyle that Spear found attractive and the constant presence of the political violence that was tearing Jamaica apart at the time. This characteristic makes Man in the Hills a major contribution to Jamaican music and culture.