Lincoln Thompson

Prince Lincoln Thompson was a Jamaican singer, player of instruments and songwriter with the reggae band The Royal Rasses. He was born June 18th 1949 and died of lung cancer on January 23rd 1999. Prince Lincoln began his recording career as a harmony singer along with Cedric Myton of The Congos in the late sixties in a band called The Tartans. He got signed up by United Artists, and released his first album Humanity in 1978. The follow up album True Experience was released in 1979. His third LP Natural Wild was recorded in England collaborating with English pop musician Joe Jackson. None of these records were a commercial success. Yet he was able to set up his own God Sent label to produce a fourth album Ride with the Rasses, recorded in Jamaica in 1982, and then a fifth, Rootsman Blues, recorded in London in September 1983. With only 3 musicians playing on each track this last album was very intimate music, reminiscent of chamber music. Prince Lincoln then opened an Ital vegetable and fish shop in Tottenham, London . He released a final album, 21st century, in 1997 after an American heard the music in his shop and agreed to become a sponsor. With Prince Lincoln's passing away reggae has lost one of its great exponents. It has been called music with skin. Lyrically he was one of the most outstanding of all modern artists, and True Experience remains probably the most profound articulation of rastafarianism ever written.

poetry

what's destroying life?

tell I if you know

you got to have love jah love

both night and day

love the way it should be

open your eyes and you will see

I've just smoked my chalice

and I'm feeling red

but I know that it is not the little herb

that has gone straight up to my head

a whopping vibration from you is always coming

girl I could do with some of your loving

over in the corner

stands the natty dread

you see his feet are skanking

and he is moving up his head

every little now and then

as he lights his little fire

surely then you know that is when

he gets his heart's desire

a revolutionary man they call me

but they don't know who I am

I am just a chanting rastaman

every day

hey we are all in this world of the living

and you ain't got nothing no no

till you got love

a little bit of conscience

mixed with just a little bit of faith

because true experience

it can only be praised