Marvin Gaye's Welcome to Jamaica

Robert Nesta Marley (1945-1981), the singer, songwriter and guitarist from Nine Mile, St Ann who became the most widely heard voice Jamaica has produced. He formed The Wailers with Bunny Wailer and Peter Tosh in the early 1960s, moving through ska and rocksteady at Studio One before the group's roots-reggae work with Lee "Scratch" Perry and then the international run on Island from Catch a Fire (1973) onward. Shot at his Hope Road home in December 1976 two days before the Smile Jamaica concert, he played anyway, left for London, and returned in 1978 to join the hands of Michael Manley and Edward Seaga on stage at the One Love Peace Concert. He died of melanoma in 1981, aged 36, and was awarded the Order of Merit. His catalogue remains the single largest route by which the rest of this archive reaches the world. He married Rita Anderson in 1966 and had children with several other women during the marriage; Cedella, Ziggy, Stephen, Sharon (adopted), Stephanie (adopted), Robbie, Rohan, Karen, Julian, Ky-Mani, Damian and Makeda are all recognised among his children, several of them Grammy-winning musicians in their own right. His state funeral was attended by Prime Minister Edward Seaga and ranking members of both major political parties, presided over by the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, with his coffin carried by members of the Twelve Tribes of Israel. More than 40,000 mourners are reported to have queued to view the body, and over half of Jamaica's population is said to have lined the roughly 55-mile funeral route from Kingston to Nine Mile, an event Bradley calls, second perhaps only to independence, the largest and most unifying single occasion in the island's history.

Red Hills Road, Kingston nightclub opened in 1972 by Winston Blake and his brothers as the fixed home of the Merritone sound, becoming one of the city's longest-running music rooms. Capacity of 250-300, with two heart-shaped bars and a collection of abstract paintings; its weekly "Turntable Thursday" was Merritone's signature night for 28 years. Opened when Red Hills Road, not yet renamed Knutsford Boulevard in New Kingston, was Kingston's night-out strip of more than six clubs, jerk vendors and street dances, it outlasted every other club on the road; the Blakes closed it in 2002.

Bob Marley's manager through the years that made him a global figure, and one of the few Jamaicans of his generation to run an international touring operation from the inside. Born in Kingston to a mother who was thirteen years old at his birth and worked as a maid, Taylor grew up in poverty and moved into the American soul circuit as a promoter before returning home. He met Marley in May 1974. Asked to assemble a benefit concert for a sports complex in Trench Town, Taylor proposed Marvin Gaye as the headline act; a local promoter added Bob Marley and the Wailers to the bill, and Taylor took over Marley's management in the same period, as Island was preparing Natty Dread. He ran the operation through the international breakthrough that followed. On 3 December 1976, when gunmen entered 56 Hope Road two days before the Smile Jamaica concert, Taylor was shot five times and critically wounded. He was flown to Miami for surgery to remove a bullet lodged against his spinal cord, and survived. The relationship ended badly in 1980. A promoter's account of a fee for a show in Gabon exposed money that had not reached Marley; by the widely repeated account Taylor admitted skimming earnings over a period of years, and Marley beat him in a hotel room there and ended the management. Taylor said afterwards that he had been made to sign away the agreement at gunpoint. "Bad Card", on Uprising that year, is generally read as Marley's answer to him. Taylor published his own account in the memoir Marley and Me, which the Marley circle disputed and which remains the most contested book about the singer. He died in Miami on 1 November 1999, aged 56, days after heart surgery.

Zap Pow, formed in 1969 by singer-bassist Michael "Mikey Zappow" Williams and guitarist Dwight Pinkney with Alpha Boys School horn players David Madden and Glen DaCosta, were Jamaica's most jazz-inflected horn-forward reggae band, scoring with "This Is Reggae Music" and, after Beres Hammond joined as lead singer in 1975, "The System" (1978).

Delroy Wilson (5 October 1948 - 6 March 1995) was a Jamaican ska, rocksteady and reggae singer often described as Jamaica's first child star, having begun recording for Coxsone Dodd's Studio One at around age 13 in the early 1960s. Among his best-known records is the Lee "Scratch" Perry-associated "Better Must Come" (1971), later adopted as a campaign theme by the People's National Party. He recorded prolifically across three decades before his death in Kingston at 46.

Marcia Griffiths (born 23 November 1949, Kingston) is a Jamaican singer whose career spans rocksteady, roots reggae and dancehall. She recorded for Studio One, formed the hit duo Bob & Marcia with Bob Andy ("Young, Gifted and Black"), and was one of the I-Threes who provided backing harmonies for Bob Marley and the Wailers; she is also known internationally for "Electric Boogie," the song behind the Electric Slide dance.

Rita Marley, Judy Mowatt and Marcia Griffiths, who sang behind Bob Marley and the Wailers from 1974 after Bunny Wailer and Peter Tosh left. All three were established recording artists in their own right before they joined and remained so afterwards, and the harmony they brought is a large part of why the later Wailers records sound as they do.

Formed in Trench Town as a six-strong vocal group — Bob Marley, Bunny Wailer, Peter Tosh, Junior Braithwaite, Beverley Kelso and Cherry Green — the Wailers took "Simmer Down" to number one in Jamaica in early 1964 with Skatalites backing. Slimmed to the famous trio, they cut rocksteady for Studio One, fierce early reggae with Lee Perry, and the Island albums Catch a Fire and Burnin' (1973) that carried reggae to the world. Tosh and Bunny left in 1974; the band name carried on behind Marley.

Winston Hubert McIntosh (19 October 1944 - 11 September 1987), born in Westmoreland, was the most confrontational of the three original Wailers and the one whose politics never softened. He met Bob Marley and Bunny Wailer through Joe Higgs, who gave free singing lessons to young people in Trench Town, and the three began singing together in 1962. Tosh's importance to the group was practical as well as vocal: he was a self-taught guitarist and keyboardist at a time when neither of the others played, and he also handled melodica, percussion and violin. He left in 1974 with Bunny Wailer, after Chris Blackwell declined to release his solo album, and made a career of unambiguous protest — Legalize It (1976), Equal Rights (1977), Bush Doctor (1978) for the Rolling Stones' label with Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, Mama Africa (1983) and No Nuclear War (1987). At the One Love Peace Concert in April 1978 he lit a spliff on stage and lectured the assembled politicians on cannabis law; that September he was arrested at Half Way Tree and severely beaten in police custody, leaving him with a broken hand and head injuries. He was killed at his Kingston home on 11 September 1987 when three men came demanding money — the gunman was Dennis "Leppo" Lobban, a man Tosh had previously tried to help. Two others died with him.

John Holt (John Kenneth Holt, 1947-2014) was a Jamaican singer who first found fame as lead vocalist of the rocksteady vocal group The Paragons, for whom he wrote "The Tide Is High" (later a hit for Blondie), recorded for Duke Reid's Treasure Isle label in the late 1960s. He launched a hugely successful solo career, cutting the album A Love I Can Feel for Studio One and later the popular 1000 Volts of Holt, and remained a fixture of Jamaican music until his death. He died on the evening of 19 October 2014 in a London hospital, aged 69, after a period of illness, having toured and performed almost until the end. Among his later peaks was "Police in Helicopter" for Henry "Junjo" Lawes.

Soul Syndicate were one of Jamaica's premier session bands of the 1970s, evolving from a Greenwich Farm group and featuring musicians such as guitarist Earl "Chinna" Smith, bassist George "Fully" Fullwood, drummer Carlton "Santa" Davis and guitarist Tony Chin. They provided backing tracks for many leading producers including Bunny Lee and Niney the Observer, contributing to a large body of roots-reggae recordings.

The West Kingston government-built yard district that shaped a remarkable share of the music: Bob Marley, Peter Tosh and Bunny Wailer came up here, mentored by Joe Higgs, and the communal yards with their standpipes and shared kitchens are where a great deal of early rehearsal happened. It is both a real place with a hard history and the most mythologised address in reggae.

Neville Livingston (1947-2021), singer, percussionist and the longest-surviving of the three original Wailers. He declined the international touring that took Marley and Tosh abroad, staying in Jamaica and building a body of work — Blackheart Man (1976) chief among it — that holds to roots and Rastafari without compromise. He remained an authority on the group's early history and a custodian of its catalogue until his death.