A term denoting the modern popular music of Jamaica and its diaspora. It also refers specifically to a rhythmic format that originated in 1968, sparked a worldwide cultural trend in the 1970s, and has continued as the bedrock of the digital forms that have come to dominate Jamaican pop music.
The origins of reggae are found in Mento, Jamaica's Cuban-inflected calypso music that dates from the late 19th century. Mento was a celebratory, rural folk form that served its largely rural audience as dance music and an alternative to the hymns and adapted chanteys of local church singing. As the Jamaican population began to shift in the late 1950s, urban migration and the social changes that accompanied industrialization created a demand for a faster, electrified dance music. In the capital of Kingston and in the larger island towns, entrepreneurs set up mobile sound systems to bring in the powerful rhythm and blues of American stars like Fats Domino and Louis Jordan. By 1959, as rhythm and blues declined under the commercial shock wave of rock and roll, local record producers sought a new dance music. Absorbing the instrumentation of the swing bands and the pulse of rhythm and blues, infused with bass-driven mento, Jamaican musicians developed a native rhythm called Ska. This used a 4/4 shuffle rhythm close to classic rhythm and blues, with an afterbeat originally played on piano, whose sound the term sought to approximate. In these ensembles, horns and reeds emphasize the guitar's chordal beat, and the trombone came to dominate solo sections after the Jamaican virtuoso Don Drummond rose to prominence around 1960, playing with the leading band, the Skatalites. In the early 1960s, Ska songs like Oh Carolina captivated Jamaica and helped launch a proud post-independence cultural identity, while the style also followed a generation of Jamaicans to England, where the music was known as bluebeat.
Members of the Skatalites quickly became local celebrities as they began to identify with a new millenarian religion spreading through the shantytowns of western Kingston. The Rastafarians, who worshipped the Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie I and preached redemption through African repatriation, began to capture the imaginations of Jamaican artists who saw in the movement a viable spiritual nationality and a soulful alternative to the black power movements sweeping the cities of North America.
By the mid-1960s, popular singers were the heroes of the western Kingston ghettos where new musical forms were created. Singers like Desmond Dekker and Joe Higgs trained the young vocal harmony trios, patterned after the Chicago soul group the Impressions, and who would soon take over the music. Trios like the Wailers and the Clarendonians developed close harmony styles in a milieu where musical instruments were scarce and expensive, and electricity was not supplied. As the turbulence of the decade spread through the ghettoes and anarchic youth went to war against society and each other, the ska singers turned to protest, spawning the Rude Boy movement, with uptempo ska-style songs of caution (like the Wailers' Simmer Down), judgement and incarceration. By 1967, the ska tempo had slowed to almost half its early metre, and Jamaican music changed again. Horns faded from the texture, replaced by bubbling, monochromatic guitar figures, and the drum and the bass-line also became locked together. Called Rock steady, it bears traces of resurgent American soul music, with new sounds from Latin America, especially the bossa nova and samba nova of Brazil. Social commentary in the form of increased calls for justice and equality became the norm of rock steady. Most crucially, the electric bass became the most important instrument of the rock steady ensemble. Rhythmic statement and strength took priority over melodic and harmonic considerations. As the foundation of the reggae bass aesthetic, the electric bass was a talking drum that played a definite rhythm, but did not necessarily play a distinct melody line. A great number of the most seminal bass lines (‘riddims’) underpinning reggae are the work of Leroy Sibbles, who played bass in ‘Sir Coxone’ Dodd's Studio One band in this period.
The reggae beat and the word applied to it both date from approximately 1968, when the vocal group the Maytals released the single Do the Reggay in Kingston, in which the rock steady pulse was slowed down. A new regular two-chord guitar pattern provided persistent counterpoint to the bass and drum riddims. The chords of the guitar and keyboard were meshed so that their accents took on reggae's characteristic pulse-like metre. Producer Clement ‘Sir Coxone’ Dodd has said that the beat and the sound evolved spontaneously during rehearsals within the recording milieu of Kingston, where, in addition to Dodd, producers Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry and Leslie Kong maintained groups of players who cross-pollinated musical ideas in the city's clubs and nightspots. The Maytals' lead singer Frederick ‘Toots’ Hibbert, credited with the first use of the word reggae, defined the term: ‘Reggae just mean comin' from the people, an everyday thing, like from the ghetto. When you say reggae you mean regular, majority. And when you say reggae it means poverty, suffering, Rastafari, everything in the ghetto. It’s music from the rebels, people who don't have what they want’.
In its formative years, reggae stayed mostly in Jamaica, with a few of the island's singers, such as Jimmy Cliff and Desmond Dekker, occasionally heard on radio in Europe and North America. In 1972 the locally produced film The Harder They Come, starring Cliff and featuring performances by other Jamaican artists, achieved cult status in metropolitan music markets. Using proceeds from his English rock music business, Island Records' Chris Blackwell pledged international backing to reggae music and especially to its rising star, the singer and writer Bob Marley. As leader of the Wailers vocal trio and band, Marley (1945–81) had been active in Jamaican music since 1962 and had worked with all the leading producers, including Coxone, Leslie Kong and, most successfully, Lee Perry. Heavily influenced by James Brown and the tenets of Rastafarianism, Marley's rebellious lyrics and piercing tenor voice, joined to the infectious swing of the Wailers' band, propelled reggae into cultural arenas all over the world. Beginning in 1973 the Wailers began to experiment with reggae forms in order to appeal to international audiences. By 1975 the re-named Bob Marley and the Wailers accelerated the basic reggae tempo, and added blues-heavy, amplified rock guitar and a gospel-inflected female trio, the I-Threes, to help propel Marley's messages of personal liberation and human rights. The Wailers also integrated the archaic African-Jamaican hand-drumming Burru rhythms, which had been absorbed by the burgeoning Rastafarian movement, into their cosmopolitan reggae ensemble. Throughout the 1970s and into the 80s albums such as Exodus (1977), Survival (1979) and Uprising (1980) established Bob Marley as the leading figure of reggae and a Third World prophet with a worldwide audience.
While Bob Marley served as the spearhead of the reggae movement, in the 1970s other musicians began to transform the music. In 1975 the drummer Carlton ‘Santa’ Davis originated the flying cymbals or ‘flyers’ reggae pattern. While his left hand played the steady reggae beat, his right hand played the half-open hi-hat cymbal in a sizzling pattern of afterbeats. The following year, drummer Sly Dunbar and bass player Robbie Shakespeare, in association with Dunbar's mentor, the drummer Leroy ‘Horsemouth’ Wallace, began to play an even faster reggae style, known as rockers, or militant. More strictly patterned than before, this style featured a military-sounding snare figure on top of an eight-to-the-bar marching figure on the bass drum. With the advent of the rockers style, the original ticking reggae beat was relegated to a rhythmic category styled roots reggae, where it languishes today as a respected if dated form.
As it branched out internationally, reggae still had to serve the needs of its home audience in Jamaica, which continued to get its local dance music from mobile sound systems, as opposed to live performances, and which underlines the origin of reggae as a recorded music rather than a performed one. In the late 1960s and early 70s, sound system DJs began to talk over the instrumental passages of the records they were playing, spreading messages of comically exaggerated braggadocio and social awareness, and developing into popular entertainers rivalling the leading singers of the day. To accommodate early talking DJs like U Roy, I Roy and Big Youth, reggae producers began to release singles whose flip-sides contained a version of the same song with the original vocals dubbed-out, or deleted, by the studio engineer. Consequently, the DJs could ‘toast’ or ‘rap’ over the pared-down drum and bass riddim. These versions, sometimes enhanced with echo and sound effects, quickly became a popular new form, known as dub, which evolved in time into various forms of pop, including Techno. The rapping Jamaican DJs in turn heavily influenced the early practitioners of American rap music.
Bob Marley's death in 1981 from cancer signalled a broad change in reggae. While pop singers like Gregory Isaacs and Dennis Brown crooned a sub-genre known as lovers rock, DJs like Yellowman injected a misogynistic stream of boasting and invective into the music. Soon this ‘slackness’ style merged with the new digitized rhythms called dancehall. Dancehall originated around 1982 when a Jamaican producer accidentally sped up the pre-set reggae rhythm on a digital synthesizer and became intrigued by the possibilities of mechanizing the essential beat. This style has ruled Jamaican music ever since, spawning other pop variations such as bam bam, effectively dancehall without bass as the guitar carries the rhythm with the drums, and ragga, played solely on digitized instruments. Roots reggae, however, remains the heartbeat of Jamaica, and no other modern form of popular music can claim reggae's astonishing success in its global dissemination.
S. Davis: Reggae Bloodlines (London, 1977, 2/1992)
K. McKnight and J. Tobler: Bob Marley and the Roots of Reggae (London, 1977)
L. Backus: ‘An Annotated Bibliography of Selected Sources on Jamaican Music’, BPiM, viii/1 (1980), 35
S. Clarke: Jah Music: the Evolution of the Popular Jamaican Song (London, 1982)
H. Johnson and J. Pines: Reggae: Deep Roots Music (New York, 1982)
S. Davis and P. Simon, eds.: Reggae International (London, 1983)
J.A. Winders: ‘Reggae, Rastafarians and Revolution’, Journal of Popular Culture, xvii/1 (1983), 61–73 [incl. bibliography]; repr. in American Popular Music, ii: The Age of Rock, ed. T.E. Scheurer (Bowling Green, OH, 1990), 225–39
M.R. Mulvaney and C.I.H. Nelson: Rastafari and Reggae: a Dictionary and Sourcebook (Westport, CT, 1990) [incl. bibliography and discography]
S. Bader: Words Like Fire: Dancehall Reggae and Ragga Muffin (London, 1993)
B. Jahn and T. Webber: Reggae Island: Jamaican Music in the Digital Age (Kingston, 1994)
K. Chang and W. Cheng: Reggae Routes: the Story of Jamaican Music (Philadelphia, 1998)
STEPHEN DAVIS