Lieutenant Stitchie: A Voice That Spanned Two Worlds

Lieutenant Stitchie, born Cleveland "Cleve" Laing, died at 60 on September 28, 2026, one day before his 61st birthday, after a long health battle that began with a stroke in 2024.

His passing leaves a real void. Jamaican music has lost a pioneer of the early dancehall era, a bridge between the dancehall and gospel communities, and a living link to the sound system culture that shaped the island's sound.

Building dancehall from the ground up

Stitchie was part of the generation that built dancehall in its formative years. A former athlete and schoolteacher, he sharpened his craft on the competitive sound system circuit in his hometown of Spanish Town in the early 1980s, alongside future names like Papa San, Wickerman and Major Worries. From those dances he rose to international recognition, bringing sharp lyricism and a distinctive delivery to the genre.

His style was unlike anything else in dancehall at the time — humorous, theatrical, and famously adopting the voices of several different characters within a single song. His single "Natty Dread" topped the Jamaican charts for 14 weeks, and in 1988 he signed with Atlantic Records, becoming one of the first dancehall artists to land a deal with a major American label.

The accident that changed everything

His story took a rare turn in 1997. After a car accident he became a born-again Christian, and he went on to reinvent himself as a gospel performer. That shift made him one of the few Jamaican artists to earn respect in both dancehall and gospel reggae, showing that conscious, faith-driven music could stand beside the genre's biggest sounds.

His career ran more than four decades across those two musical worlds. In 1999 he released his first gospel reggae album, To God Be the Glory, and followed it with a string of albums that carried the same conviction. He was awarded an honorary doctorate from Cornerstone Christian University in 2012, inducted into the Gospel Hall of Fame in 2016, and honoured in Jamaica's National Honours and Awards on the country's 59th Anniversary of Independence in 2021.

A legacy that bridges two worlds

His influence lives on in the artists he came up with and the many who followed. From the sound system dances of Spanish Town to the gospel stages of Kingston, Lieutenant Stitchie walked both roads with equal conviction — and left footprints on both that will not wash away.

Rest in power, Lieutenant.

— DJ Yagga