Bill Howell

BILL “BLADE” HOWELL was born to Leonard Percival Howell and Tenneth Bent-Howell in 1942 at Pinnacle in Sligoville, St. Catherine, on the island of Jamaica. Howell went on to become one of the first Black art directors working in New York advertising agencies in the 1970s. He has been living in New York for over fifty years.

Hélène Lee has been writing about African and Caribbean music for decades. She is best known for The First Rasta: Leonard Howell and the Rise of Rastafarianism, her groundbreaking volume on the founder of the Rasta movement. A longtime friend of the Howell family, Lee convinced Leonard Howell’s son Bill to share his own memories of Pinnacle.