Roots reggae and the Rastafari message

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.

The Rastafari ceremonial gathering and the hand-drumming that carries it — bass, funde and repeater in interlocking parts, with chanting that runs through the night. Nyabinghi is worship rather than entertainment, and it supplies the rhythmic and spiritual foundation that surfaced in roots reggae through Count Ossie and the Mystic Revelation of Rastafari, and through every roots singer who drew on the tradition.

The spiritual and cultural movement that grew in Jamaica from the 1930s, centred on the divinity of Haile Selassie I and repatriation to Africa. Long persecuted, it entered the music through Count Ossie's camp and nyabinghi drumming, and by the 1970s its language, imagery and moral seriousness had become the core of roots reggae — the faith of a once-scorned minority carried worldwide by the island's biggest export.

Oswald Williams (c. 1926-1976), the drummer who brought Rastafari into Jamaican popular music. From his camp in the Wareika Hills above Kingston he taught the akete drumming that became nyabinghi, and his drums on the Folkes Brothers' "Oh Carolina" in 1960 are usually described as the first time that sound reached a commercial record. With the Mystic Revelation of Rastafari he made Grounation, a triple album of drumming, chanting and jazz horns that stands as the fullest document of the tradition.

Rastafari drumming came down from the Wareika Hills and onto record while colonial-era radio kept its distance.

Between 1972 and 1978, reggae went to the polls and then tried to broker a peace.

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.

How Jamaican music crossed the water without leaving home.