Hugh Beresford Hammond was born on August 28, 1955, in Annotto Bay, St Mary, AllMusic records. “My father was a councillor for the area; my mother, I never knew her as anything else but a person around the house, because she had ten children. I am the ninth,” he told David Katz in Caribbean Beat. His models, he would say decades later, were Alton Ellis, Stevie Wonder, Sam Cooke and Otis Redding, the Gleaner reports; it was Ellis’s “Wanderer” he covered for his first recording, after winning talent contests in 1972–73.
Zap Pow
In the mid-1970s Hammond was a soul and pop balladeer working the amateur circuit, singing duets with Cynthia Schloss and fronting a harmony group called Tuesday’s Children. One night in 1975 the backing band at a hotel gig was Zap Pow, the horn-driven, jazz-leaning outfit whose guitarist Dwight Pinkney “checked me and said, ‘Youth, you can sing. Come join we,’” Hammond recalled to Caribbean Beat. He became Zap Pow’s lead singer; the group’s 1978 single “The System,” on Aquarius, was a hit.
‘Soul Reggae’
He kept a solo career running in parallel. His debut album, Soul Reggae, was produced and arranged by guitarist Willie Lindo and recorded at Aquarius Sound Studios with Errol Ross engineering and Steven Stanley mixing, per the sleeve credits collected at Harmony House Silekshan. The band was a who’s who of Kingston session players — Val Douglas, Harold Butler, Earl “Wire” Lindo, Tyrone Downie, Robbie Lyn, Cedric Brooks, David Madden — with Cynthia Schloss and Ernest Wilson among the backing voices. Released in 1976 on the Water Lily label, it was, as its title said, soul first.
Then came the request that changed his career. Urged by Aquarius to pick a track for single release, Hammond instead returned to the studio and cut a new ballad, “One Step Ahead,” AllMusic notes. “When my album came out, it took less than a month for it to blow out all over the place,” he told Caribbean Beat. “I released a single, One Step Ahead. It went like a bolt to number one, stayed there for three-and-a-half months, stayed on the chart itself for maybe two years.” A second No. 1, the Joe Gibbs-produced “I’m in Love,” followed in 1978.
Going solo
Hammond left Zap Pow in 1979. Royalties were slow to arrive, so he worked as a session singer and, at Aquarius, took studio time in payment for harmonies. He recorded Just a Man with Gibbs, reunited with Lindo for Comin’ at You (1981) and, in the early 1980s, cut a run of chart-toppers for Gibbs — “I’m Gonna Burn in the Morning Sun” and “Yes, I’m in Love With You Without Control” among them, by his own account — that drew an approach from A&M Records he declined over the contract.
Why it matters
Before the dancehall hits, before Penthouse, Beres Hammond was a balladeer with a band and a No. 1. The soul-schooled phrasing on “One Step Ahead” is the instrument he would carry, unchanged, into the digital era and beyond.
Listen and dig deeper
- Play Soul Reggae — including “One Step Ahead” — and Just a Man in the Listen library. Browse Beres Hammond and Zap Pow.
- Next on the timeline: ‘What One Dance Can Do’ and Harmony House (1985).
Sources: AllMusic — Beres Hammond biography; Caribbean Beat — “Beres Hammond: soul survivor” (David Katz, Issue 55); Harmony House Silekshan — Soul Reggae (1976) credits; Roots Archives — Beres Hammond discography.
Editor’s note: This entry is part of the JamaicansMusic online museum — a career timeline assembled from the archive. It is dated to the era it documents; every claim is drawn from the linked sources.