The written histories

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

Producers, executives and one dancer whose stand-off with a promoter opened a stage to Rastafarian drumming -- the women who ran the business side of Jamaican music.

A Jamaica, Queens record shop, a Sunday-night radio slot and a Queens concert hall built dancehall's American home base.

From one Yokohama selector in 1984 to stadium-sized festivals, Japan built the most devoted non-Jamaican dancehall scene in the world.

West Indian canal labourers, Panamanian raggamuffin deejays and a wave of Spanish- and Portuguese-language bands carried Jamaican reggae across Latin America.

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

A handful of Jamaican rhythm tracks are so familiar that a single drum fill or bassline note identifies them across fifty years and three generations of dancehall.

When producers like Steely and Clevie, Dave Kelly, Tony Kelly and Don Corleon began building rhythms on drum machines and keyboards, a handful of their tracks came to run entire dancehall seasons.

By the mid-1970s, stripping a reggae master down to drum, bass and echo had stopped being a B-side trick and become an album statement in its own right.

In the mid-to-late 1970s, international labels started signing Jamaican singles artists as album acts, and a run of records built to be heard start to finish redefined what a reggae release could be.

Long before Coxsone, Duke Reid and Prince Buster became reggae's founding trinity, a wider field of 1950s operators built the culture — and its DIY engineering habit followed Jamaican emigrants to London.

Wattage never settled a sound clash — the crowd's reaction did.

Most nights a sound system isn't clashing anyone — it's juggling a riddim for a dancing crowd, and someone is taping it.

The selector went from an anonymous pair of hands on the turntable to the named star of the dance.

Behind U-Roy, Big Youth and Dennis Alcapone stood toasters whose records shaped the style but whose names rarely make the standard histories.

In 1982, a 19-year-old on a South London sound system deejayed faster than anyone had heard, and a UK style was born.

A new cohort of Jamaican deejays broke through on YouTube views and streaming charts rather than radio play, without breaking from dancehall's toasting lineage.

When King Jammy's went digital in 1985, a wave of deejays rode the new Waterhouse computer sound into the dancehall mainstream.

One harmony group's lead-singer chair changed hands more than almost any other in reggae, and each singer carried it somewhere new.

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