![]() Millicent Dolly May Small, popularly known as Millie Small was the first Jamaican singer to expose Jamaican popular music on the international scene with a song which became the first million-selling Jamaican song. Her rendition of “My Boy Lollipop” became the first Jamaican song to make it on the British and American music charts reaching number one in Britain and number two in the United States in 1964. Millie Small was born in Vere, Clarendon on Octoand died on May 5, 2020. She was the daughter of an overseer on a sugar plantation and the youngest of a family of twelve. She was one of the very few female early ska era singers who originated from Clarendon. In 1960, Small won a singing contest in at the popular Vere Johns Opportunity Hour talent contest at the Palladium Theatre in Montego Bay. She got about 10 shillings for her prize. This success led her to team up with Roy Panton at just twelve and a half years old, to form the duo Roy & Millie, who both recorded the song “We’ll Meet” for producer Clement “Coxsone” Dodd. She also did the song “Sugar Plum” for Coxsone, which was also a duet. Soon after she was heading the Jamaican disc hit parade. Small was paid the sum of £23 for three successful records. When, founder of Island Records Label Chris Blackwell was twenty six he heard one of Millie’s local hits. He convinced Sir Coxsone that he could launch Small’s career if she came under his management. Blackwell brought her to England in late 1963 when she was old enough to travel alone. In later years Millie said that “I hadn’t planned on being a star, but I always wanted to be a singer, and I felt like it was my destiny to go to England.”Ĭhris Blackwell exclaimed that when he brought Millie to London his friends thought he was mad because calypso was the popular music then. #Millie small my boy lollipop 1964 download#īlackwell was actually the one who decided that Millie should do a cover of an American rhythm and blues song, My Boy Lollipop, originally done by Barbie Gaye in 1957. ![]()
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