Singers

Admiral Tibet was a Jamaican singer associated with "cultural" (Rastafari-influenced, socially conscious) dancehall through the late 1980s and 1990s, part of a lineage of artists balancing dancehall's rhythms with roots-style lyrical content.

Aisha (born Pamela Ross in Wolverhampton) grew up around her father's sound system and joined UK roots band Capital Letters as a backing vocalist before going solo in 1984; Mad Professor produced her debut album High Priestess (1988) for Ariwa, and she later recorded two albums with Norman Grant of the Twinkle Brothers.

Bermuda-born and Jamaica-based, Aisha Davis is a singer, songwriter and trained contemporary dancer who also works as an actress, voice-over artist, voice tutor and MC. She relocated to Jamaica and attended Immaculate Conception High School, trained in ballet, folk, Limón, Afro-Caribbean and Cuban technique, and holds the Alma Mock Yen Award for Excellence in Dance Theatre. Her own music fuses reggae and dancehall with soul and alternative pop: singles include "We Got Love" and its remix with Mr. Lexx, cut on Upsetta Records and Flow Productions' Love Jump rhythm (2016); "Funny Feeling" with Double X of T.O.K.; "Happy Days"; and the 2003 duet with Anthony B, "Someone Loves You Honey", which remains her best-known record. Alongside her solo work she has been a heavily worked touring vocalist, lead and backing, for Shaggy, Shabba Ranks, Ky-Mani Marley, Cocoa Tea and Alborosie, has appeared with Maxi Priest, Tanya Stephens and Bounty Killer, and sang with Bounty Killer's Reggae Sumfest set in 2016. She has toured Europe, India, Africa, the US and the Caribbean and played Reggae Sumfest, the Jamaica Jazz and Blues Festival, Carifesta, Rototom in Italy, and Reggae Jam and Summer Jam in Germany. She was more recently based in London and appeared in a McDonald's UK commercial. Not to be confused with Aisha (Pamela Ross), the UK roots singer also in the archive.

Reggae-pop singer-songwriter (Alaine Laughton) whose 2005 breakthrough "No Ordinary Love" rode Don Corleon's Seasons Riddim; she has since worked with Sly & Robbie and top Jamaican producers.

Albert Malawi was a selector and vocalist for the Twelve Tribes sound Jah Love Muzik and a drummer in Augustus Pablo's circle, one of the figures linking sound-system practice to Rastafari organisation.

Mento vocalist who was lead singer of Chin's Calypso Sextet out of Chin's Radio Service on Church Street, Kingston; his "Night Food" (written by Everald Williams) was among the fastest-selling Jamaican records of the early 1950s.

Alton Ellis was a Jamaican singer closely associated with the birth of rocksteady - his own song "Rocksteady" (1966) is one source of the genre's name - recording for both Coxsone Dodd's Studio One and Duke Reid's Treasure Isle. His ballad "I'm Still in Love," released in 1967, became one of the most repeatedly re-voiced and sampled rhythms in Jamaican music, covered and versioned across reggae and dancehall for decades after. He was admitted to hospital at the end of 2007 for treatment of cancer of the lymph glands and died of it in October 2008; rumours of his death had circulated days earlier and been dispelled by his family before it was confirmed. Born in Kingston in 1944, he began in the late 1950s in the duo Alton & Eddie before recording for Duke Reid at Treasure Isle alongside the Flames, his brother Leslie Ellis, David "Baby G" Gordon and Winston Jarrett. He was inducted into the International Reggae & World Music Awards Hall of Fame in 2006. The obituary is dated Saturday 11 October 2008 and says he died "this morning"; no second source fixes the exact day.

Anthony Doyley (c.1955 - 26 February 2011) was a founding member, lead singer and songwriter of Knowledge, a Trench Town quintet who, without ever being widely rated at home, got the thing most Jamaican vocal groups only dreamed of: a major-label contract. Tapper Zukie, their producer and mentor, took them to A&M in America, who signed them and released Hail Dread in 1978. The timing worked against them: at the height of Bob Marley's popularity a reggae act on a major tended to be promoted hard and then left to sink, and that is roughly what happened. The group formed in 1974 around Doyley with Delroy Fawlin, Earl MacFarlane and Michael Samuels on vocals and Michael Smith on guitar, and also recorded Stumbling Block for Roy Cousins. Doyley's own first recording was made as a youth for Lee "Scratch" Perry and believed lost and unreleased; more than thirty years later he learned — during a 2003 interview — that Perry had had it pressed in England after all. He later settled in Britain and died in London aged 55. On the Trench Town he grew up in he was expansive: Bunny Wailer had called it "Hollywood", not for entertainment alone but for the density of talent — cricketers, boxers, cyclists, footballers, senators, mayors, and the youngest PhD Jamaica had produced, alongside the crooks and pickpockets. It was, he said, home to the early Rastas: Leonard Howell, Sam Brown and Mortimer Planno lived there, and Count Ossie and the Mystic Revelation came daily to see them. So did the Folkes Brothers, who cut "Oh Carolina". He described a place so competitive that a young Bob Marley walking down the road with a guitar would be called over by men who had just pulled a robbery and told to play — and criticised if he was not good enough. "In Trench Town if you gonna choose a career or a profession, you got to be very good at it.".

Dancehall singer born 1962 in Kingston who rose through the Black Star sound system before recording for King Jammy's; he had early hits with Tiger and reached his commercial peak in 1994 alongside Anthony Red Rose on their How Yu Fi Sey Dat label, also combining with Josey Wales and later appearing on the multi-artist "Ballistic Affair" riddim.

Kingston-born singer (b. c.1948) who first recorded as half of the duo Dandy & Audrey with Dandy Livingstone in 1969, spent much of the 1970s and early '80s as a backing vocalist alongside her sister Pam Hall, and returned as a solo hitmaker in 1986 with "Smile" and "One Dance Won't Do," both produced by Donovan Germain for Penthouse.