Maxwell Eustace Tulloch

On a Saturday night in 1957, on a vacant lot off Waltham Park Road, four speaker boxes the size of wardrobes began to breathe, and a young electrician named Maxwell Tulloch stood behind them with one hand on the volume and the other holding a cup of white rum he never finished. The crowd that came through the gate that night did not know it yet, but it was attending the first dance of Maxie's Hi-Fi.

Born in Spanish Town in 1933, the son of a cooper and a higgler, Maxwell trained at Kingston Technical High School and joined the Jamaica Public Service Company in 1952, where he worked for forty-three years, climbing poles by day and building amplifiers by night. He wound his own coils, built his own speaker cabinets from mahogany and could hear a loose connection from across a yard. His sound, said the dancers, was clean enough to see.

Maxie's Hi-Fi played lawns, weddings, school fundraisers and, for sixty years, the crossroads at Rollington Town every Easter Monday. He hunted for the latest records on Orange Street and at the Studio One shop on Brentford Road, and won more clashes than he lost, always with the same quiet courtesy: he never insulted a rival, only turned up the bass. Young selectors and singers learned their trade under his canvas, and several became household names. He never asked for credit.

He married Gloria Hall in 1958 and raised three children on the proceeds of electricity and music. His daughter Pauline became a professor in Canada and dedicated her first book “to the man with the volume knob.” He loved cricket, ackee and saltfish and quiet Sundays; he went to church every week and said the Lord was a great fan of a good sound.

Maxwell died on 8 April 2019, aged eighty-five, at home in Kingston, with his turntable still warm. He is survived by Gloria, his wife of sixty-one years; his children Pauline, Delroy and Hortense; nine grandchildren; and a sound system that his son Delroy will keep playing every Easter Monday, as it has played since 1957.