BRATTLEBORO — When N.L. Dennis was singing in a recording studio with Toots and the Maytals, Bob Marley stopped by to listen, and praised Dennis' delivery.
Today, Dennis lives in his native Jamaica and joins hundreds of Jamaicans who come to Vermont every summer in search of better-paying work. Most of them work on vegetable farms and at apple orchards.
Dennis works as a reggae musician.
He will perform with his band The Thunderballs in Brattleboro on June 10 and July 1 and 2, and on July 16 at Next Stage in Putney.
The June 10 concert is at The Loft, 74 Cotton Mill Hill, Brattleboro, room A209, at 8 p.m. Tickets are $12, $8 for kids, with a $2 discount if you buy in advance at www.brownpapertickets.com.
The July 1 Brattleboro concert is outdoors during Gallery Walk at 6 p.m. It is free. If it rains, it won't happen. If the weather is questionable, contact the band via www.thunderballs.net and www.facebook.com/thunderballsreggae to find out if they will play.
The next night, Dennis and The Thunderballs will be at the Hooker-Dunham Theater at 139 Main St. in Brattleboro.
The band will play also play this summer in Cambridge, Mass., and in Southampton, N.Y.
In the U.S., Dennis sings and plays guitar in the Thunderballs. Dennis wrote all the songs on their CD. He met the band's keyboard player, Peter Eisenkramer of Vermont, in Jamaica in the early 1990s, when Eisenkramer was there on vacation and heard Dennis play.
Eisenkramer invited Dennis to visit him in Vermont and perform there. Dennis agreed and applied to the U.S. government for a visa that would let him into the country. It took more than 20 years for the U.S. government to give him a visa. Last year, he finally came to Vermont, and The Thunderballs performed several concerts in the Brattleboro area.
He's 63 years old, “but I play like I'm 19,” Dennis says.
Dennis says his parents were farmers in Jamaica. They grew potatoes, pumpkins, cassava, peas, plantains, bananas, and other crops. They sold their crops to a cooperative, which sold them to grocery stores and restaurants. His father sometimes also worked at a sugar factory.
There was no electricity or running water in their home, so when Dennis was a child he would carry the family's water on his head from a stream to their house, he says. They didn't have a car and couldn't afford a bus ticket, so if they wanted to travel it was on foot or by donkey.
Dennis says he built a guitar when he was eight years old and taught himself to play it. In school, a teacher helped him enter a national singing competition. Dennis won.
These days, he lives in a rural part of the Hartford district of Jamaica, near the town of Savanna-la-Mar. He has been able to support himself almost entirely with his music, though he has occasionally worked other jobs.
“I live in a poor community, where people are just barely surviving. I help them when I can, but I am struggling myself,” he says.
In the Jamaica of Dennis' youth in the 1960s and 1970s, “the white and mixed-race elite were the 'one' who ruled the 'many,'” according to an August, 2012, op-ed in The New York Times by Carolyn Cooper, a professor of literary and cultural studies at the University of the West Indies.
As of 2012, about 7 percent of the population of Jamaica was mixed-race; 3 percent was European, Chinese, or East Indian; and 90 percent was of African origin, according to the same essay.
That experience is why some of Dennis' songs are political and include calls for justice.
“I've never been involved in politics directly,” Dennis says. “But sometimes you see the situation and you want to do something. My song 'We Want a Righteous Government' was inspired by that kind of feeling.”