The written histories

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.

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

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

Reggae is often called bass music; these are some of the hands that made the bassline the lead instrument.

A reform school on South Camp Road quietly supplied the horn section for most of reggae's biggest records.

The organ's upstroke and the piano's bubble did as much to define reggae's feel as any bassline.

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

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

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