When the beat slowed: rocksteady's singers take the stage

Rocksteady duo of Keith Rowe and Phillip "Tex" Dixon, produced by Derrick Harriott, whose 1967 "Stop That Train" and "Tonight" remain vocal-group standards.

Rocksteady singer whose 1966 "Hold Them" - Joe Gibbs's first production - is widely cited among the earliest rocksteady records; a founding member of the original Uniques with Slim Smith.

Jamaican rocksteady vocal harmony group formed in 1966, originally featuring Roy Shirley, Slim Smith and Franklyn White, best remembered for the Bunny Lee-associated classic 'My Conversation'. An influential rocksteady harmony group.

Jamaican vocal harmony group formed in the mid-1960s and central to Duke Reid's Treasure Isle rocksteady sound, whose lead singers included Slim Smith and later Pat Kelly; classics include 'Queen Majesty' and 'You Don't Care'. A foundational rocksteady harmony group.

Singer whose 1966 "Take It Easy" is frequently named among the first rocksteady records, and a two-time Jamaica Festival Song winner who later turned to gospel.

Derrick Harriott is a Jamaican singer, producer and label owner, leader of the Jiving Juniors before a long solo and production career. During the early-1960s Jamaican soul boom, roughly 1963 to 1964, he fronted a backing band called the Mighty Vikings and used his own record shop and a car to get newly imported American soul singles to his band fast enough to rehearse and perform them almost as quickly as the sound systems exposed them; he describes that Motown, Curtis Mayfield and Otis Redding-influenced soul era as the direct forerunner that eclipsed ska and fed into rocksteady. He dated the early-1970s wave of "sufferah" protest songs to his own 1970 production of the Kingstonians' "Sufferah", and stressed that many of the young artists making such records were genuinely poor rather than performing hardship for effect, recalling one specific account of a bailiff repossessing a singer's bed between royalty payments.

Alton Ellis was a Jamaican singer closely associated with the birth of rocksteady - his own song "Rocksteady" (1966) is one source of the genre's name - recording for both Coxsone Dodd's Studio One and Duke Reid's Treasure Isle. His ballad "I'm Still in Love," released in 1967, became one of the most repeatedly re-voiced and sampled rhythms in Jamaican music, covered and versioned across reggae and dancehall for decades after. He was admitted to hospital at the end of 2007 for treatment of cancer of the lymph glands and died of it in October 2008; rumours of his death had circulated days earlier and been dispelled by his family before it was confirmed. Born in Kingston in 1944, he began in the late 1950s in the duo Alton & Eddie before recording for Duke Reid at Treasure Isle alongside the Flames, his brother Leslie Ellis, David "Baby G" Gordon and Winston Jarrett. He was inducted into the International Reggae & World Music Awards Hall of Fame in 2006. The obituary is dated Saturday 11 October 2008 and says he died "this morning"; no second source fixes the exact day.

Roy Shirley's 1966 "Hold Them," Joe Gibbs's first production, is often named among the earliest rocksteady records and helped establish the singer-led sound.

Jamaican singer with a distinctive high tenor, active from the ska era through rocksteady and roots - recording for Studio One and, as "the Gorgon," for Bunny Lee - and among the many voices who cut versions of Treasure Isle's "You Don't Care" rhythm.

1966 single by Hopeton Lewis whose relaxed, slowed groove is frequently cited among the first rocksteady records, marking the shift from ska's gallop to a singer-friendly beat.

Rocksteady vocal group led by Clive Murphy, best remembered for "Ride Yu Donkey" (1967) — a dancefloor staple of the era — and a run of self-produced sides that showed artists could run their own label even then.