I-Roy

Roy Reid graduated from Dinthill Technical College and worked by day as a government accountant while running his own Soul Bunny sound system beginning in 1968. He later worked the Spanish Town-based Son's Junior sound system, where producer Harry Mudie spotted him and gave him the stage name I-Roy. Early in his career he was strongly influenced by pioneering deejay Dennis Alcapone.

Through the early-to-mid 1970s, I-Roy recorded extensively for top producers including Gussie Clarke, Glen Brown, Lee "Scratch" Perry, and Bunny Lee, establishing himself among the leading deejays of the golden toasting era alongside U-Roy and Big Youth, with whom he shared a competitive, often playfully combative rivalry expressed on wax.

In 1976, Virgin Records signed I-Roy, releasing eight albums via the label's various subsidiaries, mostly using backing tracks from the Revolutionaries, giving him a rare degree of international distribution for a Jamaican deejay of his generation.

As dancehall's harder digital sound displaced the toasting style in the 1980s, I-Roy's commercial fortunes declined. He died of heart failure in a Spanish Town hospital on November 27, 1999, at age 55, leaving behind one of the largest and most stylistically varied catalogues of any deejay from reggae's classic era.