Since the 1970s Gray's career has waxed and waned, and he had returned to singing ballads by the 1990s. During the mid-'70s, working with producer Edward "Bunny" Lee, he saw success on both sides of the Atlantic as a mainstay of the roots reggae movement. Gray briefly tried basing himself in New Orleans - not surprising since his early idols included Fats Domino - and then returned to Jamaica, where he found fresh inspiration in the booming demand for roots reggae. GrayGray moved to the Pama label in 1968, releasing his sides on their Camel Records imprint, which included "Woman a Grumble" and his version of King Floyd's "Groove Me." By 1972 he was back with Island Records, where his reggae versions of the Rolling Stones' "Tumblin' Dice" and John Lennon's "Jealous Guy" were released to complete (and astonishing) indifference strangely enough, one of his bigger successes around this time took place in Jamaica, where his "Hail the Man" - a single praising the Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie - was embraced by the burgeoning Rasta audience. Owen later claimed to have had little education, but he read widely and discovered he had some facility for poetry. ![]() He was the son of John Owen and Martha Jane. He is an American born on Apin Mason County, near Mobile, Alabama.
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