Althea & Donna

Well supported

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.