BIOGRAPHY
The Story
General Trees was born Amos Eughsha Edwards in Drews Land, Kingston, on December 13, 1960. Before music became his profession he worked as a shoemaker in his father’s shop.
Trees followed Maurice “Jack Scorpio” Johnson’s Black Scorpio sound from his youth; his older brother had already deejayed on the system. Black Scorpio became the environment in which Trees developed from a local microphone talent into one of Jamaica’s major mid-1980s deejays.
Black Scorpio was also known as the Horseman sound. Lord Sassafrass carried the Horseman identity, while Trees became the Younger Horseman and incorporated jockey imagery into his stage presentation.
When Jack Scorpio moved deeper into record production, the sound-system relationship became a studio relationship as well. Trees recorded songs including Heel and Toe, Monkey and Ape, Ghost Rider and Crucifixion.
Mini Bus became Trees’s best-known social-observation record. Drawing on Jamaica’s changing public-transport system, it transformed everyday experience into dancehall commentary and became a major Jamaican song of 1986.
Gone a Negril came directly from experience. Trees and the Black Scorpio crew were returning from a trip to Negril when the idea developed. Trees first worked the song live on Black Scorpio; Jack Scorpio then took the concept into the studio, with the Riddim Kings cutting the rhythm at Channel One.
The song later became part of a father-daughter stage routine. At Reggae Sunsplash in 1987, Trees brought his eight-year-old daughter Kareen onstage to perform the female part of Gone a Negril. As a child she performed as Fat and Fast and also had her own song, Baby Degree.
Kareen later stepped away from the microphone for many years before returning as Lady Plus Plus. She reunited publicly with her father at Rebel Salute in 2020.
Trees’s catalog continued through Nuff Respect, Kingstonian Man and Everything So So. He later reunited with Jack Scorpio, toured Europe with Black Scorpio in 2005 and also worked with King Stur-Gav.
In late 2019 Trees suffered multiple strokes that affected his vocal performance. He nevertheless returned publicly at Rebel Salute in January 2020.
