Phyllis Dillon’s rocksteady classic is a gem from Duke Reid’s legendary Treasure Isle studio. It’s been widely described as the greatest performance by a female singer in Jamaican music.

Unusually for Jamaican artists in the mid-’60s, Phyllis was influenced as much by white American singers like Connie Francis and Patti Page as by black soul singers like Dionne Warwick.

She was discovered singing with a vocal group called The Vulcans at one of the regular talent contests held in Kingston, Jamaica, in a place called The Glass Bucket Club.

Phyllis was spotted Duke Reid’s studio guitarist Lynn Taitt and introduced to the studio by sax-man Tommy McCook, who plays on her self-penned song with his group The Supersonics, released in 1966.

With her career just beginning to take off, Phyllis then moved to New York at the end of 1967 and launched a new career in banking, leading a double life with regular trips back to Jamaica to pursue her parallel music career until 1971.

Her brief but prolific music career included a cover of Perfidia, a song by a 1940s Cuban bandleader that had been popularised by surf rock band The Ventures, and a version of naughty calypso classic Don’t Touch Me Tomato. Others included CSNY’s Love The One You’re With, Bettye Swann’s Make Me Yours and Perry Como’s Tulips And Heather.

In the late ’90s she went back into the studio with Lynn Taitt after a couple of decades when there was something of a ska revival in America, but her comeback was cut short when she died of cancer in 2004.