Ancestors — figures who have passed

Robert Nesta Marley (1945-1981), the singer, songwriter and guitarist from Nine Mile, St Ann who became the most widely heard voice Jamaica has produced. He formed The Wailers with Bunny Wailer and Peter Tosh in the early 1960s, moving through ska and rocksteady at Studio One before the group's roots-reggae work with Lee "Scratch" Perry and then the international run on Island from Catch a Fire (1973) onward. Shot at his Hope Road home in December 1976 two days before the Smile Jamaica concert, he played anyway, left for London, and returned in 1978 to join the hands of Michael Manley and Edward Seaga on stage at the One Love Peace Concert. He died of melanoma in 1981, aged 36, and was awarded the Order of Merit. His catalogue remains the single largest route by which the rest of this archive reaches the world. He married Rita Anderson in 1966 and had children with several other women during the marriage; Cedella, Ziggy, Stephen, Sharon (adopted), Stephanie (adopted), Robbie, Rohan, Karen, Julian, Ky-Mani, Damian and Makeda are all recognised among his children, several of them Grammy-winning musicians in their own right.

Winston Hubert McIntosh (1944-1987), singer, guitarist and one of the three original Wailers alongside Bob Marley and Bunny Wailer. The most confrontational voice of the three, he left the group in 1974 and made a solo career of unambiguous protest — Legalize It (1976) and Equal Rights (1977) — and of public defiance, notably his address to the crowd and the politicians at the 1978 One Love Peace Concert. He was murdered at his Kingston home in 1987.

Dennis Brown (1 February 1957 - 1 July 1999) was a Jamaican reggae singer whom Bob Marley reportedly cited as a favourite and who was widely dubbed the "Crown Prince of Reggae." A child prodigy who recorded for Studio One as a teenager, he became one of the genre's most prolific and beloved voices, known for hits such as "Money in My Pocket" and "Here I Come," and worked extensively with producers including Joe Gibbs and Winston "Niney" Holness.

Gregory Isaacs (Gregory Anthony Isaacs, 15 July 1951 - 25 October 2010), nicknamed the "Cool Ruler," was a Jamaican reggae singer and a defining voice of lovers rock. He co-founded the African Museum label and shop with Errol Dunkley and scored his most famous record with "Night Nurse," the title track of his 1982 album for Island Records. His smooth, plaintive delivery made him one of reggae's most emulated vocalists.

Ewart Beckford (1942-2021), the deejay who made toasting a recorded form. He had been talking over records on the sound systems for years — with Dickie Dynamic, Sir George the Atomic, and most importantly on Coxsone Dodd's Downbeat — when Duke Reid put him on the Treasure Isle rocksteady rhythms in 1970. The results took over the Jamaican charts, at one point reportedly holding the top three positions at once with "Wake the Town", "Rule the Nation" and "Wear You to the Ball", and the album Version Galore made the form permanent. What he established was that a deejay's voice over an existing rhythm was a record in its own right, not a novelty: everything from Jamaican deejaying to rap descends in part from those sessions. He ran his own Stur-Gav Hi-Fi from the late 1970s, the sound that gave Josey Wales and Charlie Chaplin their start, and recorded into his final years. He was awarded the Order of Distinction and died on 17 February 2021.

Neville Livingston (1947-2021), singer, percussionist and the longest-surviving of the three original Wailers. He declined the international touring that took Marley and Tosh abroad, staying in Jamaica and building a body of work — Blackheart Man (1976) chief among it — that holds to roots and Rastafari without compromise. He remained an authority on the group's early history and a custodian of its catalogue until his death.

Rainford Hugh Perry (1936-2021), producer, singer and studio visionary — the most idiosyncratic figure in Jamaican music. He came up through Coxsone's Studio One and Joe Gibbs before going out on his own as Upsetter, producing The Wailers' hardest early work and the Upsetters' instrumentals. From 1973 he built the Black Ark behind his house and made records there — for Max Romeo, Junior Murvin, The Congos and The Heptones — whose layered, echo-drenched sound has never been convincingly copied. He burned the studio down in 1979 and spent the following decades working abroad as reggae's most celebrated eccentric.

Osbourne Ruddock (1941-1989), the Waterhouse electronics engineer who invented dub. He built and repaired amplifiers, ran his own Hometown Hi-Fi sound, and began cutting versions with parts dropping in and out, drenched in reverb and delay worked live at the controls — first as exclusive plates for his own dances, then as a form in its own right. He trained Scientist, Prince Jammy and others, and his approach to the mixing desk as an instrument reshaped record production worldwide. He was shot dead outside his home in 1989.

Clement Seymour Dodd (1932-2004), sound-system operator, producer and founder of Studio One. He came up running the Downbeat sound in the 1950s, in direct rivalry with Duke Reid, importing American R&B and scratching the labels off so rivals could not identify what he was playing. From 1963 he built at 13 Brentford Road the studio that gave first recordings to a remarkable share of Jamaican music's canon — The Wailers, Burning Spear, Alton Ellis, Marcia Griffiths, Dennis Brown, Horace Andy, John Holt — and it is widely described as the first recording studio in Jamaica owned by a Black Jamaican, a claim repeated often enough to be worth attributing rather than stating flatly. The house bands he assembled, the Skatalites and later Sound Dimension, cut rhythms that have been versioned continuously for sixty years, which is why the label is so often called the Motown of Jamaica. He moved his base to New York in the 1980s while the catalogue kept working without him. He died on 4 May 2004, days after the stretch of Brentford Road outside the studio was renamed Studio One Boulevard in his honour.

Arthur Reid (1915-1975), policeman turned liquor merchant, sound-system owner and producer. His Trojan sound contested the late-1950s dances with Coxsone's Downbeat, and from his Bond Street premises he built Treasure Isle into the defining rocksteady operation — Alton Ellis, the Techniques, the Paragons, Phyllis Dillon — before opening his rhythms to U-Roy's toasting in 1970 and helping launch the deejay record.