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Many of reggae's most durable solo careers started in someone else's harmony stack.

The 1966 tempo drop turned a session-band music into an island of singers.

While the diaspora built lovers rock in London studios, singers at home in Jamaica were writing their own sweet-voiced side of the story.

How a handful of session players shaped record after record.

Before the I-Threes, a chain of Kingston vocal trios gave reggae's harmony sound its female voice.

From the Skatalites to the Firehouse Crew, uncredited studio bands built every era of Jamaican music while record labels named only singers and producers.

From the rocksteady queens and the first female producer to the I-Threes, the lovers-rock pioneers and the dancehall crown, women have carried Jamaican music from the studio floor to the world stage.

A 2010s wave of singers reclaimed roots reggae for a new century.

A single 1988 rhythm carried Jamaican dancehall into American R&B radio.

Reggae did not simply get exported. Sounds in Yokohama, Stuttgart and London built their own scenes, flew to Kingston for dubplates, and started winning.

In Jamaica the rhythm track, not the finished song, is the durable unit of creativity.

A running thread through Jamaican song: elders who hand the microphone directly to the next generation.

How the sound-system deejay's live talk-over became recorded art.

In Jamaica's foundation years the man who paid for the session owned the sound - and often the shop, the studio and the label too.

Singers and producers changed by the week; the studio band underneath them almost never did.

A path from Millie Small's 1964 crossover to Sister Nancy and Marcia Griffiths in global dance memory.

In British-Jamaican bedrooms and blues dances, women singers made a genre of their own.

How a cheap keyboard preset in 1985 reset the sound of dancehall.

The vocal trio carried Rastafari's word from Studio One into the roots era.

Women in Jamaican music ran labels, owned catalogues, sang the rhythms that never went out of print and took dancehall abroad — usually while being described as somebody's backing singer.