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. His state funeral was attended by Prime Minister Edward Seaga and ranking members of both major political parties, presided over by the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, with his coffin carried by members of the Twelve Tribes of Israel. More than 40,000 mourners are reported to have queued to view the body, and over half of Jamaica's population is said to have lined the roughly 55-mile funeral route from Kingston to Nine Mile, an event Bradley calls, second perhaps only to independence, the largest and most unifying single occasion in the island's history.

Winston Hubert McIntosh (19 October 1944 - 11 September 1987), born in Westmoreland, was the most confrontational of the three original Wailers and the one whose politics never softened. He met Bob Marley and Bunny Wailer through Joe Higgs, who gave free singing lessons to young people in Trench Town, and the three began singing together in 1962. Tosh's importance to the group was practical as well as vocal: he was a self-taught guitarist and keyboardist at a time when neither of the others played, and he also handled melodica, percussion and violin. He left in 1974 with Bunny Wailer, after Chris Blackwell declined to release his solo album, and made a career of unambiguous protest — Legalize It (1976), Equal Rights (1977), Bush Doctor (1978) for the Rolling Stones' label with Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, Mama Africa (1983) and No Nuclear War (1987). At the One Love Peace Concert in April 1978 he lit a spliff on stage and lectured the assembled politicians on cannabis law; that September he was arrested at Half Way Tree and severely beaten in police custody, leaving him with a broken hand and head injuries. He was killed at his Kingston home on 11 September 1987 when three men came demanding money — the gunman was Dennis "Leppo" Lobban, a man Tosh had previously tried to help. Two others died with him.

Dennis Emmanuel Brown (1 February 1957 - 1 July 1999) was the singer Bob Marley named as his own favourite, and whom Marley called the Crown Prince of Reggae — a title that stuck because nobody seriously disputed it. He began recording for Coxsone Dodd at Studio One in 1969, aged twelve, and his first single "No Man Is an Island" built airplay steadily for almost a year before it became a hit across Jamaica, which is an unusual way for a career to start: not an explosion but a slow, undeniable accumulation. That became the pattern. He recorded with Winston "Niney" Holness, who produced his breakthrough, then through his most prolific years with Joe Gibbs, and later with Gussie Clarke in the dancehall era, including the celebrated pairings with Gregory Isaacs. In the mid-1970s he founded his own label, DEB Music, and used it to release other singers — Junior Delgado and Gregory Isaacs among them — which puts him in the small group of Jamaican artists who became producers of other people's records rather than only of their own. "Money in My Pocket" reached number 14 in Britain in 1979 and Love Has Found Its Way charted there in 1982; Visions of Dennis Brown (1977) and "Wolf and Leopard" (1976) remain the records people reach for first. He died in Kingston at 42, of a collapsed lung following pneumonia contracted on tour in Brazil, and was posthumously made a Commander of the Order of Distinction in 2011.

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. He worked as an electrician and cabinet maker before recording for producer Winston Sinclair in the late 1960s and forming the trio the Concords in 1969. When that failed he went solo, and in the mid-1970s launched African Museum to hold artistic and financial control of his own work while continuing to record for GG's, Trojan, DEB, Charisma, Tad's and Jammy's. Love Is Overdue (1973) was his first successful album, followed by In Person, Cool Ruler (1978), Soon Forward (1979) and the internationally massive Night Nurse. His last album, Brand New Me, came out on African Museum in 2008. He died of lung cancer at his London home on 25 October 2010, aged 59, surrounded by his wife Linda and three of his eleven children.

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.

Lee "Scratch" Perry is a Jamaican producer and singer whose innovations across four decades, particularly at his own Black Ark studio, made him one of the most influential figures in Jamaican music. His 1968 single "People Funny Boy", a dig at his former employer Joe Gibbs for allegedly forgetting who helped him succeed, is presented as one of the earliest records to sound like true reggae, through its up-front metronomic bass and rhythmically played guitars echoing mento, Burru and Kumina patterns. In 1967, recording as "the Defenders", he cut "Set Them Free" as a direct rebuttal to Prince Buster's "Judge Dread" records, arguing rude boys' crimes grew from poverty rather than innate wrongdoing, an early instance of the explicit Black-consciousness lyric that later became central to Jamaican music. He also argued reggae's essential character came from rural migrants arriving in Kingston, not from the city itself.

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. Per the engineer and broadcaster Mikey Dread, who apprenticed under him, Tubby built his first echo unit himself from two old tape recorders and constructed custom pressure-sensitive, spring-loaded switches for triggering sound effects, so that striking them harder or softer varied the result. Dread also credited a Tubby-built high-pass filter, applied to the snare and hi-hat, with producing the splashy "flying cymbal" sound heard on Bunny Lee and Johnnie Clarke productions such as "No Man Can Escape His Judgement" and "Jah Jah in Deh in Deh".

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 "Duke" Reid (21 July 1915 - January 1975) served ten years as a Jamaican police officer before leaving the force to help his wife Lucille run the family business, the Treasure Isle Grocery and Liquor Store at 33 Bond Street in Kingston — and it is worth pausing on that sequence, because almost everything he became grew out of a shop. The sound system he ran through the 1950s was among the island's most popular, and the name he took for himself, the Trojan, is generally traced to the British-built trucks that carried his equipment. He contested the late-1950s dances with Coxsone's Downbeat, and was crowned King of Sounds and Blues three years running. He built the studio above the store, and named the label after it: Treasure Isle. What came out of that room defined rocksteady — cool, unhurried, elegantly arranged — through Alton Ellis and the Flames, the Techniques, the Paragons, Justin Hinds and the Dominoes, Stranger Cole, the Jamaicans, the Melodians and Phyllis Dillon. Then, at the turn of the 1970s, he did the thing that mattered most for everything after: he opened his own rocksteady rhythms to the toasting of U-Roy and Dennis Alcapone, and in doing so helped invent the deejay record. He performed the part as well, presiding over toasting contests in an ermine cloak with a gilt crown. He died in January 1975, having sold Treasure Isle to Sonia Pottinger the year before.