Pioneers, Viceroys and Winston Groovy

The Viceroys ? - Wheel and Jig - Harry J - 1974

Vinyl reggae single.

With it`s tinkly piano motif and oddly dated words, `Wheel and Jig` is a quirky gem of a reggae single. But nothing is quite what it seems with this disc. 

The track is credited to The Viceroys, A Jamaican vocal trio noted for their smooth harmonies and philosophical lyrics. 

The songwriting credit, however, goes to Crooks/Agard/Robinson, the members of the most successful line-up of The Pioneers, and the production credit goes to Pioneers founder Sydney Crooks.

It doesn`t sound like the Viceroys and the chorus backing vocals do sound a lot like The Pioneers. This has led some collectors to regard this as an unacknowledged Pioneers outing. 

In fact, this track also appeared elsewhere the same year. Check out the LP `Presenting Winston Groovy` and you find exactly the same recording on Side Two, credited to Winston Groovy and The Pioneers. Like the single this album was produced by Sydney Crooks and features a number of covers of Pioneers songs plus some Crooks compositions presumably written specifically for this album.

Having listened to some of his other stuff I`m convinced that 
Winston Groovy and The Pioneers collaborated on this track. 

                     
                          `Presenting Winston Groovy` - Cover Art    


Sidney Crooks ran his own record label, the aptly-named Pioneer,  in Jamaica and licensed a number of tracks to companies in the UK and US in the `70s, a number of which he credited to The Viceroys. Whether this was accurate or not is hotly debated amongst collectors !

Most of those tracks had previously been issued as singles in Jamaica. Interestingly,this does not seem to have happened with `Wheel and Jig` , which makes me think it was always intended to appear on the Winston Groovy album and for some reason was wrongly attributed to The Viceroys when UK licensing was arranged.

Winston Groovy has his own You Tube channel, `Winston Groovy Music`, which features much of his back-catalogue. `Wheel and Jig` can be found there  so if you want to hear it, scoot along there pronto and experience this slightly odd but deeply wonderful tune ! 

You might think that`s the end of the story where `Wheel and Jig` is concerned, but there`s more to come, as my next post will show.