Browse the whole archive

Website launched in October 1999 by photographer Peter Dean Rickards and Ainsworth Weir, using early internet livestreaming and photography to present Kingston sound-system, street-dance and everyday life beyond tourist-industry cliche, alongside the magazine FIRST.

An online station and archive built around music by alumni of Alpha Boys School, the Kingston institution whose band programme trained a remarkable share of Jamaica's horn players — the Skatalites among them. It is one of the few places the school's musical legacy is gathered and playable in one stream.

Bass Culture: When Reggae Was King (2000), Lloyd Bradley's history of Jamaican music written from black Britain — strongest exactly where most histories are thinnest, on the sound systems, the migrations and the UK end of the story. A backbone source for this archive.

BBC digital radio station launched in 2002 with programming devoted to Black British music, including dedicated reggae and dancehall shows hosted over the years by David Rodigan, Chris Goldfinger, Seani B and Robbo Ranx among others.

BBC local radio station whose reggae programming in the late 1970s and 1980s, including Tony Williams's Reggae Rockers show and Ranking Miss P's Riddim and Blues, helped bring Jamaican music to a mainstream British audience.

Billboard, the United States music-industry trade publication and chart provider whose Reggae Albums chart and awards coverage are standard references for reggae and dancehall's commercial performance and for Grammy-season debate.

British weekly music tabloid launched in January 1976 covering soul, funk, reggae and northern soul for Black British readers; it was renamed Echoes in 1992 and later published monthly, and its reggae writers included Penny Reel.

British monthly magazine published by IPC from December 1973 to April 1984, the first UK publication to treat reggae as a serious cultural phenomenon and among the first to cover African music; its launch was shaped by staff writer Carl Gayle.

Boomshots, a reggae and dancehall media outlet founded by journalist Rob Kenner, publishing interviews, video premieres and commentary; among the outlets that documented the 2010s reggae revival and modern dancehall.

Al Fingers' book of 2012 on how a Somerset shoe became a Jamaican institution. Clarks desert boots and Wallabees have been worn, named in lyrics and argued over in Jamaica for half a century, and the book traces that through photographs, record sleeves and interviews — one of the few sustained studies of dancehall as a matter of dress rather than sound.

Jamaican free-to-air television station launched in 1993 as the country's first private commercial broadcaster, long a home for entertainment and dancehall programming such as OnStage.

Sonjah Stanley Niaah's 'DanceHall: From Slave Ship to Ghetto' (University of Ottawa Press, 2010), which traces the dancehall space through a 'performance geography' linking plantation, ghetto and Black-Atlantic performance traditions.

Beth Lesser's photographic documentation of 1980s dancehall — collected in her Soul Jazz book Dancehall — made in Kingston's yards and studios as the era happened: the essential visual record of the pre-digital dance, its deejays, sounds and style.

DancehallMag is an online publication covering dancehall and reggae news, interviews, chart activity and retrospectives, useful to the atlas as a source for contemporary public-facing industry documentation rather than as a substitute for primary records.

The early-1980s British television documentary series whose crew filmed King Tubby's Waterhouse studio, capturing rare footage of the 'hole in the wall' room, resident engineer Prince Jammy and producer Bunny Lee at work.