J.C. Lodge Still Feels The Sting Of Producer Joe Gibbs’ ‘Dishonesty’ Decades Later

Veteran Reggae singer J.C. Lodge says the effects of late producer Joe Gibbs’ dishonesty, which saw him being slapped with a devastating lawsuit for unpaid royalties and improper songwriting credit over her breakout song Someone Loves You Honey, are still being felt to this day.

Released in 1980, J.C.’s version of Someone Loves You Honey was a cover version of a 1978 Charlie Pride song of the same name, which, itself, was written by Don Devaney and originally released by country singer Johnny Rodriguez in 1974. J.C.’s cover was produced by legendary music producer and multi-instrumentalist Clive Hunt at Gibb’s studio in Kingston.  However, Gibbs had reportedly claimed all rights to the song, from songwriter to producer to publisher.

The success of the song, which was eventually licensed to Arista, led to Joe Gibbs’s undoing when the massive lawsuit resulted in the closure of his studio.

Lodge, while describing Gibbs as a congenial person, said during an interview with Television Jamaica’s Anthony Miller that, on the downside, her business relationship with the producer was disastrous, as he grabbed all the royalties for Someone Loves You Honey.

“He was a very fatherly figure, you know.  You felt comfortable in his presence. But he just wasn’t honest, you know.  So, we got a raw deal with him, and we’re still paying that price,” she told Miller.

“We have never gotten what we should have gotten from the success of Someone Loves You Honey.   Joe Gibbs was everything on that project, you know.  He thought he was the writer, the publisher, everything. So everything went to him,” she said sardonically.

“But then in the long run, he paid the price.  Because he was sued by the writers, the publishers, by the original writers… He got sued, and because of that, he lost his business.   So he paid a big price for that,” she added.

Born Joel Gibson in Montego Bay, Gibbs died at the University Hospital of the West Indies in February 2008 at the age of 65.

According to his biography, in his teenage years, he worked as an engineer on the US naval base at Guantánamo Bay.  Upon returning to Kingston in the mid-1960s, he operated a television and radio repair shop on Beeston Street, and also began selling records there.

According to The Guardian newspaper in an article published following the producer’s death, “entering into record production was an obvious next step for Gibbs”, who, after being approached by singer Roy Shirley in late 1966, “scored an instant hit with Hold Them”.

The Guardian also noted that “further sessions followed, but as Gibbs had no musical training, he often made use of the talents of Lee “Scratch” Perry, a gifted arranger who had recently left the stable of the better-established Studio One.”

“With Perry, Gibbs scored hits such as Errol Dunkley’s You’re Gonna Need Me, but when Perry moved on, Gibbs recruited Niney the Observer, another gifted arranger who brought him many hits, including Nicky Thomas’s Love of the Common People, which reached the UK top 10 in July 1970,” the British publication noted.

As it relates to the creation of J.C.’s version of Someone Loves You Honey, producer Clive Hunt said he ended up producing the song after, on one fateful day, he invited her to Joe Gibbs’ studio so that he could record a song for her. 

According to Hunt, on that day, he had some of Jamaica’s finest musicians at his disposal, among them Willie Lindo, Lloyd Parkes, and others, who had been booked to assist in the production of Reggae singer Tyrone Taylor’s Cottage in Negril album.

He said that Errol Thompson, the famed engineer who worked with Joe Gibbs, had a Charlie Pride album on which he started looking for tracks for June to cover. The chosen one was Someone Loves You Honey.   

Hunt said after he and the musicians had eaten, they spent the rest of the evening recording one of the most-loved cover versions in the history of Reggae music, after which he left for the United States. “No one ever get paid for that enuh because they were working for me and they never did it for nothing, but we were working on Joe Gibbs studio time and on Joe Gibbs ting,” he explained.

As for Joe Gibbs, Hunt said he was present when the producer’s undoing came in the United States for claiming to be the author of the lyrics to Someone Loves You Honey, a song in which he played absolutely no part in creating.

“I was in Miami at Joe Gibbs place when di sheriff – black Sheriff come and call him outside and say: ‘yo man, I am ashamed of you’.  Because they had sued him over the song because what him always do – and what a lot a dem used to do, and some a dem still do it.  If me produce a song and walk weh, a man put him name on it ‘written by him’.  It marked produced by Joe Gibbs, written by Joe Gibbs, when he wasn’t even in the place,” Hunt relayed in an I Never Knew TV interview.