From ska's first pop hit to dancehall's sample afterlife

A line dance choreographed by Ric Silver and globally associated with Marcia Griffiths's "Electric Boogie".

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.

"Bam Bam" is Sister Nancy's 1982 song, produced by Winston Riley for his Techniques label over the Stalag riddim (built from Ansel Collins's 1974 "Stalag 17"); it is now regarded as one of the most sampled reggae recordings in hip-hop history.

Sister Nancy (Ophlin Russell) is a Jamaican deejay whose "Bam Bam" became one of dancehall's most widely circulated recordings.

Millie Small's 1964 international hit, produced by Chris Blackwell and widely cited as an early global breakthrough for ska.

Jamaican music sings in Jamaican. That is a plainer fact than it sounds: for most of the twentieth century the language had no official standing, was treated as broken English in schools, and was largely absent from broadcast speech — and then the records went around the world in it. The music did more than any policy to establish the language publicly, and translation remains one of the harder problems for anyone archiving it.

Millie Small (Millicent Dolly May Small CD, 6 October 1947 - 5 May 2020), born in Clarendon, was, in the words of the reference works, "the Caribbean's first international recording star and its most successful female performer". Her "My Boy Lollipop", released in early 1964 when she was sixteen, reached number two in both the UK and the US — held off the top by the Four Pennies' "Juliet" and the Beach Boys' "I Get Around" respectively — and has since sold more than seven million copies. It was the record that launched Island Records into mainstream pop, although Chris Blackwell licensed it to Fontana rather than overextend Island's then-meagre resources, and it appeared on Mercury's Smash subsidiary in the US. It is also cited as the first hit recorded in the bluebeat style, a direct ancestor of reggae.