Winston McAnuff

Winston Boyd McAnuff, also known under the stage name Electric Dread (born 1957) is a Jamaican singer and composer of reggae and dub music.

Life and career

McAnuff was born in Manchester Parish, Jamaica into a family of preachers. One of his great-grandfathers was Scottish. He started his musical career singing gospel in the church choir. He recorded his first album Pick Hits to Click in 1978. Two years later his second album What the man "a" deal wid was released. His best known song from this time is the single "Malcolm X" (about Malcolm X), which was also recorded by Earl Sixteen, and most successfully by Dennis Brown. It was originally recorded by McAnuff for Joe Gibbs but the producer decided not to release it, and he got Earl Sixteen to record it before the song was given to Dennis Brown who recorded it for his Visions of Dennis Brown album. The song was the subject of a legal dispute in 2013 between McAnuff and Greensleeves Records after the record label allegedly registered the song as co-written by Brown. A third studio album, Electric Dread, was released in 1986.

Although McAnuff had reasonable fame in Jamaica, none of his work was released elsewhere. It wasn't until...

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