| BY HOWARD CAMPBELL— Observer senior writer— | 1 |
One of the women who helped sign many reggae acts to major record companies during the 1990s, Maxine Stowe has music in her blood.
She has worked with Sony International, Island Records and Motown. There has also been stints with VP Records and Studio One, the outstanding Jamaican label started by her uncle Clement “Coxson” Dodd.
It was at Sony that Stowe had her greatest triumphs. She was an influential member of the company’s artist and repertoire team during the 1990s, when it had great success with artistes like Shabba Ranks, Mad Cobra, Patra, Diana King, and Super Cat.
Stowe was born in Kingston but grew up in Long Island, New York. Her mother was Dodd’s sister but as a teenager music was not her greatest passion, rather the Black Power movement.
She recalls reading books like Eldridge Cleaver’s provocative Soul on Ice. Stowe, who was inspired by firebrand activists such as Angela Davis and Guyanese Walter Rodney, entered Columbia University as a political science major but left after one semester and returned to Jamaica in the mid-1970s where she discovered the Rastafarian faith.
Back in Kingston, she met intuitive artist Ras Daniel Hartman (Pedro of The Harder They Come fame) and became part of the Rasta community. It was while helping Hartman sell his art to hotels and record shops that she got reacquainted with Dodd who was enjoying a rebirth at Studio One with singers like Freddie McGregor and Sugar Minott.
Stowe helped Dodd establish and operate Coxson Music City, a export hub for Studio One product in Brooklyn. After two years, she left to manage Minott before moving on to VP Records, the Queens, New York, company that was on the verge of becoming the leading source for dancehall music in the United States.
While at VP, Stowe got her big break.
“There was interest by this lady at Columbia called Carol Cooper to put together a Spanish reggae compilation called Dancehall Reggae Español. Her boss David Kahne saw that I had a command of the industry and that’s how I got my job at Columbia,” Stowe told the Jamaica Observer in a 2012 interview.
Columbia was part of Sony International which comprised a group of thriving labels that also included Epic, which had major stars like Michael Jackson and Luther Vandross on its roster.
Through her first signing, deejay Super Cat, Stowe brought Jamaican dancehall to the company. He was followed by Shabba Ranks, Patra, Mad Cobra, Tony Rebel, Diana King, and Jimmy Cliff, all of whom had US pop hits in the early and mid-1970s.
“It was a heyday for dancehall but I felt why we didn’t have that continuity of success at Sony was because Jamaica was not included in their plans,” she recalled. “So I went to Island because they were looking at Jamaica again.”
Stowe had a fruitful run with Island, working on Stephen Marley’s Chant Down Babylon, an album of digital duets by Bob Marley and hip-hop stars. She helped promote hit songs by Chevelle Franklyn (Dancehall Queen) and the company’s music-driven films, Dancehall Queen and Third World Cop.
In the last 10 years, Stowe was an advisor to reggae great Bunny Wailer, who died in 2021.
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