This week live in the studio in the Chattanooga Public Library we have a set from Chattanooga’s original reggae band, Milele Roots playing, as it says on their Facebook page, Reggae and Dub without objection! Rockers! Roots Music!
In an interview with an Alabama newspaper, Lion Craan, longtime bass player and founding member of Milele Roots talked about the origin of the band’s name. He and some musical confederates had traveled to Atlanta for a concert by the venerable Rasta combo Steel Pulse in the summer of 2013. The next day they went to Centennial Park to chill. The brother of a then-bandmate from Kenya was in tow, and Craan and company began asking the Kenyan how to say different words in Swahili.
"And at one point I said 'How do you say forever?'" Craan says, "and his brother says, 'Well, Milele means eternal.' And we were like, 'That'll work. Milele Roots sounds good.'"