The Ultimate Guide to Great Reggae - The complete story of Reggae told through its greatest songs, famous and forgotten - Michael Garnice
Nora Dean
The Ultimate Guide to Great Reggae - The complete story of Reggae told through its greatest songs, famous and forgotten - Michael Garnice
Michael Garnice [+]
Freelance writer
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Description
More than any other singer in reggae, Nora Dean has a life story shaped by contradiction and irony. She possesses one of reggae’s most beguiling voices. And she has recorded one of reggae’s most beloved songs, along with other memorable tracks, including one that might be reggae’s strangest. Yet most of her music is currently unavailable, never having been released on LP or CD, and next to nothing has been written about her. She didn’t write many songs, but her first attempt, which was not even complete, resulted in a classic. A good portion of her songs were about sex, but she would have preferred to have stuck to gospel, which she began recording at age fifteen. Now a born-again Christian after a serious illness, Nora Dean is a pious woman, who released a series of self-produced gospel CDs (as did Hopeton Lewis) out of New York from the mid-1990s through the mid- 2000s. From that vantage point, she looks back at her reggae career with nothing but regret. Yet these songs have brought so much joy to so many.