The written histories

In May 1974 a charity show for a Trench Town sports complex brought Marvin Gaye to Kingston. Bob Marley opened for him -- and met the manager who would run his career.

Not every Jamaican dance happened under the sky. From 1930s society clubs to Portmore's dancehall rooms, some of it happened behind a cover charge, a bar and a roof.

From Abidjan to Benin City to Johannesburg, reggae became a continental voice for reconnection, protest and faith in the 1980s.

A rhythm built in a Kingston studio in 1989 travelled to Panama, through New York, into San Juan, and became the pulse of the biggest Spanish-language pop music on earth. A Los Angeles court is now preparing to put the question of who owns it to a jury.

From a Marley 7-inch on a reggae-starved island in 1977 to four decades inside France's sound systems and music press -- one correspondent's account, written directly to the Atlas, of a scene this archive had barely reached.

A singer from a St James village spent a decade chasing an American record deal, then went home and found the music he was actually built for.

How fenced yards, imported 78s and crowned sound men turned 1950s Kingston dances into an industry.

Britain got its reggae from Jamaican migrants. The Netherlands got its from Surinamese ones, a squat movement and a pirate radio transmitter.

Sound systems, area dons and party colours — how PNP and JLP patronage shaped who played where, and who got their start.

The rewind is the most democratic verdict in Jamaican music — a whole room overturning a record in three seconds. Then somebody worked out you could pay for it.

Live rounds fired into the air were once the highest compliment a Jamaican dance could pay a record. Nobody ran. Then the ordinary man took the sound and left the gun at home.

A brewery, a rum house and a tonic wine have shaped Jamaican music as surely as any studio — and what the dance drinks has changed twice, from a crate at a man's foot to bottles held up in the video light.

For fifty years the surest way to hear Jamaican music was not to turn on a Jamaican radio. This is how that changed — and what it cost the people who changed it.

Pink Panther made Black Kat feared. Tony Matterhorn sharpened his clash craft on King Addies. Then each selector carried that history into a career bearing his own name.

February in Jamaica is an official music month — part commemoration, part trade fair, part argument about what the state owes the culture it now celebrates.

Six records that sit exactly on the fault lines: where ska begins, where it slows, where reggae gets its name, where dub, deejay and digital take over.

Noise laws, broadcast bans and courtrooms have shaped Jamaican music as surely as studios did — and they left the paper trail the studios never kept.

Jamaican television and radio interviews are where most artists have told their own version, and almost none of it sits in an archive anybody maintains.

The record is only part of it. Dancehall is also a dance vocabulary, a weekly street calendar and a man on a microphone whose job is to make the room feel like something.

From the rude boy's sharp suit to a Northamptonshire shoe that dancehall made its own, Jamaican music has always dressed itself, and the clothes carry the argument.