A label map from Studio One to VP

In Jamaica a record label was usually one producer with a name on a 45, not a company. This story maps the network that connected them: Studio One and Treasure Isle in Kingston, the producer imprints that followed, the London houses that licensed the music, and VP Records in New York, which came to distribute it all.

Two rooms, one rivalry

Jamaica's first great labels grew out of the sound system dances of the 1950s. Clement "Coxsone" Dodd ran Sir Coxsone's Downbeat; Arthur "Duke" Reid, a former policeman, ran the Trojan, named after the British-made truck that carried his equipment. Both men cut exclusive acetates to win the dance, and both realised that the records they commissioned could be sold as well as played.

In 1963 Dodd opened his own studio at 13 Brentford Road in Kingston, known ever after as Studio One. Reid answered with Treasure Isle, built above his liquor store on Bond Street. Each kept a house band — the Skatalites and their successors at Brentford Road, Tommy McCook's Supersonics at Treasure Isle — and between them they recorded most of the island's first generation of stars.

Treasure Isle owned the rocksteady moment of 1966 to 1968, with Alton Ellis, the Techniques, the Paragons and the Melodians. Studio One's rhythms proved the more durable currency, recut and versioned for decades as the foundation of reggae and dancehall. When U-Roy talked over Treasure Isle rhythms in 1970 and took the top three places on the Jamaican chart at once, he turned the deejay from a sound-system voice into a recording star — the breakthrough rather than the invention, since Count Machuki had established the style on the sounds and Sir Lord Comic and King Stitt had already reached record; when Reid fell ill, he sold his catalogue to Sonia Pottinger, Jamaica's leading woman producer, shortly before his death in 1975.

The producer is the label

Most of what came next was built by people who had passed through those two rooms. Lee "Scratch" Perry worked for Dodd before founding his Upsetter label in 1968; the imprint carried the Wailers' recordings of 1970 and 1971, and the Black Ark, the small studio he built behind his house in 1973, produced Max Romeo's War ina Babylon and the Congos' Heart of the Congos. A backyard operation became one of the most imitated sounds in the world.

A label here was seldom a company. It was one producer's name, travelling wherever the tapes went.

Bunny "Striker" Lee showed how little a label needed to be. He owned no studio, hiring time where he could and moving his session band, the Aggrovators, from room to room; his productions surfaced on a scatter of imprints, Jackpot and Justice among them. The "flying cymbal" sound he cut with Johnny Clarke in the mid-1970s filled dances in Jamaica and Britain, all of it made, in effect, by one man with a rented hour.

Henry "Junjo" Lawes ran the pattern into the dancehall era. His Volcano label voiced Barrington Levy, Yellowman and Eek-A-Mouse over the Roots Radics, recording at Channel One and mixing with Scientist at King Tubby's — a chain of addresses, none of them his. In 1985 King Jammy, Tubby's former apprentice, released Wayne Smith's Under Mi Sleng Teng, built from a preset rhythm on a small Casio keyboard and widely credited with starting dancehall's digital era.

Donovan Germain's Penthouse, established in Kingston in the late 1980s — the label from 1987, the Slipe Road studio from 1988 — carried the model into the digital decade with something closer to a company: a studio of its own and a run of hits with Beres Hammond, Marcia Griffiths, Wayne Wonder and the young Buju Banton. It remains the clearest bridge between the producer-label tradition and the modern reggae business.

The London houses

Little of this reached the wider world without London. Chris Blackwell founded Island Records in Jamaica in 1959 and moved it to London in 1962, selling Jamaican singles to Caribbean communities in Britain. In 1973 Island's Catch a Fire recast Bob Marley and the Wailers as an albums act for the rock audience, the decisive step in reggae's international career.

Trojan Records, founded in London in 1968 and named after Reid's sound system, began as a venture between Island and Lee Gopthal's Beat & Commercial company. It licensed Jamaican hits by the hundred, sometimes sweetening them with strings for the British charts, and took Ken Boothe's Everything I Own to number one in 1974. The company failed the following year, and its enormous catalogue has changed hands several times since.

Greensleeves began as a west London record shop in 1975 and became a label in 1977. Through the 1980s it was the main British outlet for the new Kingston producers, issuing Junjo Lawes's Volcano productions and Jammy's digital rhythms almost as fast as they were cut. It was less a rival to the Jamaican labels than their overseas edition.

The distribution end

Vincent and Patricia Chin ran Randy's, the record shop at 17 North Parade in Kingston with the Studio 17 recording room upstairs, before emigrating to New York in the late 1970s. The label they founded in Queens in 1979 took its name from their initials, and VP Records grew into the dominant independent distributor of reggae and dancehall in North America, home of the Strictly the Best compilations and of Sean Paul's Dutty Rock. In 2008 VP bought Greensleeves, folding the British catalogue into the New York operation. A rhythm cut at Brentford Road could now be versioned in Waterhouse, licensed in London and shipped from Queens — one map, drawn by many hands.