https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/12/arts/music/prince-buster-trailblazer-of-ska-dies-at-78.html

Cecil Bustamente Campbell was born in Kingston, Jamaica, on May 24, 1938. He performed with teenage groups in Kingston; he also became a boxer, taking the name Prince Buster.

In the 1950s he began working for one of Jamaica’s top producers and sound-system disc jockeys, Coxsone Dodd. By the end of the decade he had opened a record store, Buster’s Record Shack, and was playing street parties with his own sound system, the Voice of the People. He decided to start producing songs as well as spinning them.

Jamaicans were listening to, and imitating, the American R&B that reached the island on radio stations from New Orleans and Miami. Prince Buster’s productions were more deliberately Jamaican. His production of the Folkes Brothers’ “Oh Carolina,” recorded in 1959, meshed the traditional Nyabinghi drumming of a Rastafarian musician, Count Ossie, with what would come to be known as a ska beat.

That beat, in songs like Eric Morris’s “Humpty Dumpty,” made for huge hits in Jamaica and also had an impact in 1960s Britain. Prince Buster’s instrumental “Al Capone” was a Top 20 hit there in 1965.

By the end of the 1960s ska had given way to the slower rocksteady beat, a closer precursor of reggae. Prince Buster adapted, notably with his series of singles using his Judge Dread character. But in the early 1970s he gave up producing music and concentrated on business ventures, including record stores and a jukebox company, and moved to Miami.