Women who changed the sound

Jamaican singer whose 1964 hit "My Boy Lollipop" took ska/blue beat into the international pop charts.

Phyllis Dillon was a Jamaican rocksteady and reggae singer recorded almost exclusively for Duke Reid's Treasure Isle label in the late 1960s, where her ballad style - including "Perfidia," a rocksteady rework of the classic Spanish-language standard - made her one of the genre's defining and most consistently celebrated women vocalists.

One of the leading Jamaican female vocalists of the 1960s and 1970s and the sister of Alton Ellis, recording across ska, rocksteady and reggae for Studio One, Treasure Isle and later producers. Repeatedly honoured at home as Jamaica's top female vocalist, she never got the international run her voice merited; she died in 2000.

Marcia Griffiths (born 23 November 1949, Kingston) is a Jamaican singer whose career spans rocksteady, roots reggae and dancehall. She recorded for Studio One, formed the hit duo Bob & Marcia with Bob Andy ("Young, Gifted and Black"), and was one of the I-Threes who provided backing harmonies for Bob Marley and the Wailers; she is also known internationally for "Electric Boogie," the song behind the Electric Slide dance.

Rita Marley (born Alpharita Constantia Anderson, 25 July 1946, Cuba) is a Cuban-Jamaican singer, the widow of Bob Marley, and a member of the I-Threes who backed the Wailers from the mid-1970s. Originally part of the vocal group the Soulettes, she recorded solo material including "One Draw" and has since managed the Marley musical legacy through the Bob Marley Foundation.

Judy Mowatt (born 1952) is a Jamaican reggae singer best known as one of the I-Threes, the female trio that sang backing vocals for Bob Marley and the Wailers from 1974. Her 1979/1980 solo album Black Woman is widely regarded as a landmark reggae album by a female artist and among the first reggae albums produced by a woman.

Althea & Donna were Althea Rose Forrest and Donna Marie Reid, seventeen and eighteen years old and still at school — Queens and St Andrew High School for Girls — when "Uptown Top Ranking" was cut for Joe Gibbs in 1977. The song is the two of them ad-libbing over the rhythm from Trinity's deejay record "Three Piece Suit", and it went to number one in Britain in January 1978, making them the first Jamaican female duo to top the UK singles chart and the first signed to a major. It is usually filed as a one-hit wonder, which undersells what the record actually demonstrates: that the patois of a Kingston schoolyard could go to number one in a country that could not follow half the words.

Sister Nancy (Ophlin Russell) is a Jamaican deejay whose "Bam Bam" became one of dancehall's most widely circulated recordings.

Lady G is a Jamaican dancehall deejay and singer active from the 1980s onward, part of the small but consistent line of women deejays who built careers alongside dancehall's male-dominated mainstream.

Lady Saw (Marion Hall) is a Jamaican dancehall artist who became one of the genre's most prominent women performers through the 1990s, known for explicit "slackness" lyrics that pushed back against dancehall's largely male-dominated performance space, before later moving toward gospel music under her birth name.