Reggae Music

by Read Listen Learn

In 1978, Jamaica was a troubled land. The country was on the verge of civil war as armed groups from the two rival political parties fought on the streets of the capital, Kingston.

On 22nd April of that year, the ‘One Love’ reggae concert took place with all the leading bands and singers of the time. The key moment of the concert to appeal for calm and national unity came when the reggae singer, Bob Marley, held together the hands of the two rival political leaders. The crowd went wild. It seemed that reggae music had brought peace to its native Jamaica. How had this music started? And, how had it become so central to the Jamaican identity?

We know quite a bit about where reggae came from but one remaining mystery is the origin of the name. Some sources say it may have come from the church choirs singing in Latin, the word ‘reggae’ approximating ‘to the king’ – a reference to God. But some of the musicians who were around at the time the new music style was born, say that the name is just a voice imitation of the beat: ‘reg-gae, reg-gae’.

Jamaica, populated mostly by the descendants of African slaves, has a strong folk and church music tradition which, with Jamaica being an island, was able to develop its music through the late 19th and early 20th century in isolation from strong outside influences.

It was the coming of radio in the 1930s that changed everything. Suddenly, even quite poor people could listen to the music coming out of other Caribbean islands or the Americas. Cuban sounds, Mexican Mariachi, Haitian church services, all available to anyone with access to a radio. Jamaicans particularly liked the music broadcast out of New Orleans in Louisiana. Both the American musicians and their American fans were black like Jamaicans. The lyrics were in English and the rhythms were exciting – jazz, blues and so on, by artists like Fats Waller and Amos Milburn – and if you listened closely you could copy the songs.

And that’s what local Jamaican musicians did, learning it all by ear. Then they took the new music around the dancehalls of the island. These early, copied songs tended to have a fade in and out effect that imitated not the New Orleans music but the way radio distorted it. It was an accident but it gave the Jamaican versions of American songs a distinctive touch.

Within a few years, special Jamaican fusion began to appear so that, by the early sixties, sounds like Mento, Blue Beat and Ska were beginning to be known further afield than the dancehalls of Jamaica; not least in England where a new community of West Indian youngsters were sharing the music with their white English friends at school and work.

By the late sixites, these Jamaican sounds had transformed into a new beat called ‘Rock Steady’ which, in very short order, turned into the reggae rhythm. And Reggae was soon associated with the Rastafarian religion. This sect, part Christian, part Judaic and part African, had started in the 1930s in the back hills of Jamaica. Its followers grew their hair in long, untidy plaits called ‘dreadlocks’, and they smoked cannabis as a religious ritual. They lived, as vegetarians, by gardening in rural areas and were little known even in Jamaica. Until the late 1960s, when young people in Western Europe and North America began to grow their hair long, and smoking cannabis became fashionable. The best way for a young Jamaican to combine fashion, religion, racial pride, cannabis and some fine music was through reggae and Rastafarianism, part of Jamaica’s new, post-imperial culture.

The outlandish look of the musicians and the hypnotic beat of the new music soon took it beyond Jamaica, especially to places with a West Indian immigrant community. Reggae bands began to tour in the U.K., Europe and North America. And the U.K. started to produce some first class reggae groups, such as ‘Aswad’.

But the unchallenged kings of reggae were ‘Bob Marley and the Wailers’, with a string of hits that have become classics of the genre. ‘One Love’, ‘Jammin’, ‘No Woman, No Cry’ and ‘Three Little Birds’ are just a few of the Marley songs that formed a soundtrack to the seventies and early eighties.

At the same time, several different schools of reggae were developing. ‘Dub’ reggae is usually instrumental and has a heavy, syncopated beat. It often makes reference to cannabis and is for listening to, not dancing. Rockers’ reggae is a more mechanical, aggressive style developed by the percussion team, ‘Sly and Robbie’ (Sly Dunbar and Robert Shakespeare). ‘Lovers’, as the name might suggest, is romantic and was developed not in Jamaica but in South London, which had become reggae’s second home.

Many white pop artists, like ‘Police’ and ‘Boy George’ used a reggae style in their work. ‘UB40’ was a pop/reggae band with all but one member being white.

Apart from generating many different styles, reggae has also been the inspiration to later styles like ragga, dancehall, reggaeton and hip-hop.

Despite all these innovations, traditional reggae remains an important sector of the music world. With its messages of peace and love, its symbols of African pride and its seductive tropical beat, it looks like reggae will be with us for a while yet.