A Rastafari devotional recording central to Don Carlos's roots-reggae repertoire.

The cow-horn trumpet the Maroons used to carry signals across the hills, a coded instrument as much as a musical one, able to send messages British forces could not read. It is still blown at Accompong, and it is one of the oldest continuously used instruments in Jamaica.

The Maroon community in the Cockpit Country of St Elizabeth, founded under the 1739 treaty, and the site of the annual January 6 celebration marking it. Abeng blowing, Kromanti drumming and song are central to the observance, a living link to the music that predates every commercial form on the island.

Held at Accompong in St Elizabeth every 6 January, marking the 1739 treaty that ended the first Maroon war and recognised Maroon autonomy. The abeng is blown and gumbay drums played, and the festival is one of the clearest surviving lines back to African musical practice in Jamaica, a living observance rather than a heritage display.

The lead drum of the Rasta drum family, the smallest of the three nyabinghi drums, played with the fingers and carrying the improvised line over the funde's steady heartbeat and the bass drum's foundation. Count Ossie brought it into the recording studio, and its phrasing echoes through reggae drumming.

Al Anderson is an American-born guitarist who played lead guitar with Bob Marley and the Wailers in the mid-1970s, contributing the guitar solo on "No Woman No Cry" among other recordings, before spending time in Peter Tosh's band.

The Akan-derived cycle of trickster tales about Anansi the spider, foundational to Jamaican oral culture and children's storytelling, and a recurring source for pantomime, folk performance and lyric imagery.

Aston "Family Man" Barrett (1946-2024) was the bassist, arranger and bandleader of Bob Marley and the Wailers, whose melodic basslines anchored the group's Island-era catalogue. With his brother Carlton on drums he formed the Wailers rhythm section, having first played together in Lee "Scratch" Perry's Upsetters.

In Rastafari discourse 'Babylon' names the systems, governments, police and institutions seen as being in rebellion against the will of Jah and as inheritors of colonial and slave-era oppression; the notion of 'chanting down Babylon' through word, sound and Nyabinghi drumming is a core theme carried into reggae and dancehall lyrics.

French singer-songwriter named, alongside Serge Gainsbourg, among the first white French artists to record reggae rhythms in the late 1970s, drawn to the music's rebellious charge. He worked with Jamaican musicians and, like Gainsbourg, brought the sound to a mainstream French audience years before the country had a reggae scene of its own to speak of.