Bunny Lee

One of reggae’s most prolific and transformative figures, Bunny “Striker” Lee helped originate dub by treating the recording studio itself as a creative instrument. In close partnership with the visionary engineer King Tubby, he began stripping apart completed mixes and reassembling their elements into wholly new pieces, an approach that quickly became central to Jamaican music. Among his signature contributions was the “flying cymbal” rhythm, a crisp, rolling hi-hat pattern that injected extra tension and momentum into mid-’70s grooves and soon defined an entire phase of the island’s sound. Across four decades Lee guided the music’s evolution from its ska origins through the rise of dancehall and well beyond.

Born Edward O'Sullivan Lee in Jamaica on August 23, 1941, he first entered the business in 1962 when his brother-in-law, singer Derrick Morgan, secured him a position promoting records for Duke Reid’s Treasure Isle label. By the middle of the decade Lee had moved to Ken Lack’s Caltone imprint, where he oversaw his debut production, Lloyd Jackson & the Groovers’ “Listen to the Beat,” in 1967. Later that year he scored his initial major success with Roy Shirley’s “Music Field” on WIRL; after launching his own imprint he quickly followed with further well-received sides such as Morgan’s “Hold You Jack,” Slim Smith’s “My Conversation,” and Pat Kelly’s “Little Boy Blue.”

By the close of the 1960s Lee ranked among reggae’s leading producers, and in 1971 he began an intensive collaboration with King Tubby. Tubby had already developed the core techniques of dub—removing vocals, emphasizing basslines, and selectively adding or dropping instruments—to supply fresh rhythm tracks for sound-system DJs. Once delays, fades, and phasing entered his toolkit, the engineer’s reputation was firmly established, yet the partnership with Lee yielded some of the strongest work either man would create. Unlike most contemporaries, Lee deliberately cut sessions with the Aggrovators knowing Tubby would later subject the tapes to radical reconstruction, resulting in dense, resilient rhythms that withstood extreme studio manipulation and produced some of the most lasting dub versions on record. At the height of his activity, roughly spanning 1969 to 1977, Lee generated thousands of titles, building an intricate catalog of vocal performances, DJ cuts, and dub variants in which each release seemed to spawn the next.

A particularly fertile 1974 alliance with Johnny Clarke delivered enduring roots tracks including “None Shall Escape the Judgement” and “Move Out of Babylon.” The same year Lee also produced Owen Grey’s hit “Bongo Natty,” while Cornel Campbell’s 1975 smash “The Gorgon” inspired an entire wave of similarly titled “Gorgon rock” records. It was during this stretch that Lee’s productions popularized the “flying cymbal” sound that became both his trademark and the defining texture of mid-’70s dub. Over time he worked with an array of artists ranging from Jackie Edwards and Alton Ellis to Ken Boothe, demonstrating a keen commercial instinct that matched his experimental impulses. Once Tubby opened his own facility in the early ’80s and began issuing his own material, their joint sessions grew less frequent and Lee’s output slowed. One notable exception was his production of Beenie Man’s 1983 debut album The Invincible Beany Man: The 10 Year Old D.J. Wonder, recorded when the future star was still a child. Lee later acquired Joe Gibbs’ former studio on the outskirts of Kingston, experimented briefly with digital equipment, and gradually withdrew from active production, his stature within reggae history already secure. Bunny “Striker” Lee died on October 6, 2020, at age 79 from respiratory failure following an extended battle with kidney disease.