Women who changed the sound

Millie Small (Millicent Dolly May Small CD, 6 October 1947 - 5 May 2020), born in Clarendon, was, in the words of the reference works, "the Caribbean's first international recording star and its most successful female performer". Her "My Boy Lollipop", released in early 1964 when she was sixteen, reached number two in both the UK and the US — held off the top by the Four Pennies' "Juliet" and the Beach Boys' "I Get Around" respectively — and has since sold more than seven million copies. It was the record that launched Island Records into mainstream pop, although Chris Blackwell licensed it to Fontana rather than overextend Island's then-meagre resources, and it appeared on Mercury's Smash subsidiary in the US. It is also cited as the first hit recorded in the bluebeat style, a direct ancestor of reggae.

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 February 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.

Marion Marie Hall, born at Galina in Saint Mary on 12 July 1969, was performing on local sound systems at fifteen and took her name in 1987 from Tenor Saw, whose singing she had grown up on. Working the Stereo One system in Kingston, she made her way into a dancehall in which slackness was a male franchise, and matched it — explicit, unapologetic, and funny — which got several of her performances banned in parts of Jamaica while equally lewd men were left alone. That double standard is most of what her career is about. "Smile", cut with Vitamin C in 1999, went gold; "Underneath It All" with No Doubt in 2002 went triple platinum; the Grammy it won went to No Doubt, on whose record she was the featured vocalist. On 15 December 2015 she was baptised, left dancehall, and has recorded gospel since as Minister Marion Hall.