Marcia Griffiths, a legendary figure in reggae music, reflects on her incredible 60-year journey in the music industry. In an exclusive interview with WMV, she shares her thoughts on longevity, dedication, and the spiritual connection she has with her craft.
“Longevity means dedication, you know, sincerity, and yeah,” she began. “From the beginning, I know I was chosen. But everyone starts so naive, not knowing, no vision to see where you’re heading, but I know that whatever I wanted to do was something more on the positive level rather than anything that is not of service to mankind. I wanted to, whatever I’m doing, unite the world through that. And I could not have chosen a better route to go than through the music. You know, from I was a little girl, I remember that I would always desire,” Griffiths told WMV.
Marcia Griffiths’ career began with Byron Lee and the Dragonaires, then she moved on to Studio One, where her career blossomed even further. At Studio One, she met singer Bob Andy, who played a significant role in her early success.
“It was a blessing for me there, in the entire decade of the sixties because that’s where I met Bob Andy, and Bob Andy wrote a whole series of songs for me in the sixties. And we had collaborations together. And then we moved on to Harry J in the seventies. In 1970, Bob Andy and myself came together and re-recorded Nina Simone’s song ‘Young, Gifted and Black.’ We did a re-recording of that song, which went to number two on the British charts.”
Although the chart success of her collaboration with Bob Andy led to other career milestones, her solo career was always in sight.
“So we left Jamaica, went to England, and we toured extensively with that song. It was one of our biggest hits then,” Marcia said. “And we had a follow-up called ‘Pied Piper.’ That was another stage, another level. The music changed, and everything went on. I was just having experience after experience, and everything was just getting better. So from the beginning, I started out as a solo artist. And even though I was with Bob and Marcia or I-Threes with Bob Marley, I never ever relinquished my solo career at no time. I just managed to maintain my solo career whether I’m on the road with Bob Marley and the I-Threes or wherever with Bob Andy,” Griffiths said.
One of her most iconic songs as a solo act is “Electric Boogie,” the song that inspired one of the world’s most popular dances, The Electric Slide. The dance has its own website and is a registered US copyright owned by choreographer Richard L. “Ric” Silver who created the dance from the 1976 demo by Bunny Wailer.
The song however, was first released in 1982, then re-released in 1989 by Mango Records, a division of Island Records and it peaked at No. 51 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1990.
There are two versions of the song, with Griffiths and Wailer doing solo versions with music videos.
More than three decades later Marcia still gets special requests to perform the tune, but “Electric Boogie” is often mistaken for an American artist’s work, she says. “Well, up until now, a lot of people, I don’t think they even recognize that that song is done by a Jamaican woman. Because a lot of people thought it was an American artist.”
In 2018, Aazios, an online LGBTQ news and entertainment publication, reported that Rastafarian artist Bunny Wailer had confirmed the song was about a vibrator, saying, “I’m surprised it took people this long to figure out.”
The late Bunny Wailer who first recorded the song with Griffiths in 1976 slammed those reports in EDM Magazine, stating, “At no time have I ever lent credence to a rumor that the song was inspired by anything other than Eddie Grant’s Electric Avenue. To state otherwise is a falsehood and offends my legacy, the legacy of the singer Marcia Griffiths, and tarnishes the reputation of a song beloved by millions of fans the world over.”
Marcia, not pleased with the rumors herself, also set the record straight once more and dismissed the fabricated origin story of “Electric Boogie.”
“Well, let me tell you, I don’t let it upset me at no time because the truth, the truth sets you free, and I know how that song came about, and very quickly I can run it by you,” she said, reminiscing about a trip to Toronto and the serendipitous discovery of the rhythm box that led to the creation of “Electric Boogie.”
“Judy, Rita, and myself, we went to perform in Toronto in the early seventies, and of course, we are in a male-dominated business. Nine out of ten times, we don’t get paid. We get hard luck story. So long story short is that we got seven hundred Canadian dollars each. That was our pay. And I remember following the wind down in Toronto, Canada, walking from store to store, and I ran into this rhythm box. It’s like a keyboard. And the man working in the store showed me the different songs that this box had. Oh, you know, it was so interesting. It had hundreds of songs, hundreds of beats. And I fell in love with the box, bought the box with my seven hundred dollars, just maybe three hundred and something dollars for the rhythm box, took it to Jamaica, and I just started fiddling around with it,” she told WMV.
Armed with her boombox, she showed off her new musical toy to her kindergarten friend Bunny Wailer who was visited one evening.
“I was showing him the rhythm box, and there was a particular sound on the box called the repeat of the piano. So I added the beat, Bunny and I added the beat from the box, and added the keyboard to it. And that alone was like a rhythm. He loved it, and I loved it even more. So he recorded that little beat, took it to Portland, came back the following day with the song, and he told me that what inspired him to write that song was Eddie Grant’s ‘Electric Avenue’ because of how the thing was going,” she now recalls.
“I have the original rhythm from the box, you know, I have it here always on my phone. And from how the beat was moving, it was on that Eddie Grant song that inspired him to write that song because it’s like a happy song. It’s a dance song. You know, it’s just being free. You can’t see it,” she said with beaming pride.
As for the reports of the song being about a sex toy, Marcia says, “You know, it’s electric, it’s shocking, and people interpret with some very negative hearts, and I’m saying even the things that they would utter, we from Jamaica at that time and that age, we knew nothing about vibrator and all those rubbish. Nothing.”
Morally, the 74 year old singer passionately defends her innocence and the purity of “Electric Boogie.”
“We were innocent, clean people. And as to Bunny Wailer, then he was one ardent rasta man that don’t even sit on anyone’s chair when I know him. So this is all clean stuff. This negativity that people conceive, I don’t know where it came from. All I know is that nothing existed like that. There was nothing negative about that song,” she said.
Griffiths latest song is “Mek We Dance” produced by Clive Hunt.
