One riddim, many voices: how the version built Jamaican music

Clement Seymour Dodd (1932-2004), sound-system operator, producer and founder of Studio One. He came up running the Downbeat sound in the 1950s, in direct rivalry with Duke Reid, importing American R&B and scratching the labels off so rivals could not identify what he was playing. From 1963 he built at 13 Brentford Road the studio that gave first recordings to a remarkable share of Jamaican music's canon — The Wailers, Burning Spear, Alton Ellis, Marcia Griffiths, Dennis Brown, Horace Andy, John Holt — and it is widely described as the first recording studio in Jamaica owned by a Black Jamaican, a claim repeated often enough to be worth attributing rather than stating flatly. The house bands he assembled, the Skatalites and later Sound Dimension, cut rhythms that have been versioned continuously for sixty years, which is why the label is so often called the Motown of Jamaica. He moved his base to New York in the 1980s while the catalogue kept working without him. He died on 4 May 2004, days after the stretch of Brentford Road outside the studio was renamed Studio One Boulevard in his honour.

Studio One instrumental cut by the Sound Dimension in 1967 and one of the most versioned rhythms ever recorded. Willie Williams's "Armagideon Time" (1979) is its most famous vocal cut; its rolling piano-and-bass figure has carried roots singers, dancehall deejays and UK jungle alike.

Ewart Beckford (1942-2021), the deejay who made toasting a recorded form. He had been talking over records on the sound systems for years — with Dickie Dynamic, Sir George the Atomic, and most importantly on Coxsone Dodd's Downbeat — when Duke Reid put him on the Treasure Isle rocksteady rhythms in 1970. The results took over the Jamaican charts, at one point reportedly holding the top three positions at once with "Wake the Town", "Rule the Nation" and "Wear You to the Ball", and the album Version Galore made the form permanent. What he established was that a deejay's voice over an existing rhythm was a record in its own right, not a novelty: everything from Jamaican deejaying to rap descends in part from those sessions. He ran his own Stur-Gav Hi-Fi from the late 1970s, the sound that gave Josey Wales and Charlie Chaplin their start, and recorded into his final years. He was awarded the Order of Distinction and died on 17 February 2021.

Studio One instrumental rhythm cut by the Sound Dimension in the late 1960s, one of the foundation riddims. Its best-known journey runs through the Mighty Diamonds' "Pass the Kouchie" (1981) to Musical Youth's "Pass the Dutchie", a UK number one in 1982 — one Brentford Road session financing decades of versions.

Steven "Lenky" Marsden's rhythm of 2002, and one of the few Jamaican productions to change how pop records everywhere were built. Its hand-clap pattern and spare, syncopated bed carried Sean Paul's "Get Busy" and Wayne Wonder's "No Letting Go" to the top of international charts within months of each other, and the clap figure was imitated for years afterwards.

Jamaican collective management organisation for songwriters, composers and music publishers, which licenses the public performance and reproduction of musical works and distributes the royalties to its members. It is the body a Jamaican songwriter joins to be paid when a work is played on radio, in a dance or on a stage, and it sits beside JAMMS, which handles the separate rights in the sound recording.

Early-2000s juggling rhythm from Donovan "Don Corleon" Bennett, issued in 2003 (Greensleeves Rhythm Album #44) with cuts from Bounty Killer, Elephant Man, Sizzla, Vybz Kartel, Agent Sasco (Assassin), Baby Cham and Wayne Marshall.

Treasure Isle rocksteady rhythm built by Arthur "Duke" Reid around the Techniques' 1967 "You Don't Care" (an adaptation of a Curtis Mayfield / Impressions song), sometimes catalogued as the Barbwire riddim, and relicked for decades by producers from Winston Riley onward.

"Three Piece Suit" is Trinity's deejay record that helped anchor the Three Piece Suit rhythm family; Althea & Donna's answer-style "Uptown Top Ranking" turned that same musical setting into a global reggae pop memory.

The Stalag riddim begins as "Stalag 17", an instrumental written and played by Ansell Collins and released on Winston Riley's Techniques label in 1973. It went on to become one of the most heavily versioned rhythms in Jamaican music, and the bed for the single most sampled record dancehall has produced: Sister Nancy's "Bam Bam" (1982) is voiced over Stalag, not over any rhythm of its own. Tenor Saw's "Ring the Alarm" (1985) is the other cornerstone cut. Riley was shot in Kingston and died in 2012; the rhythm he issued in 1973 is still being voiced and sampled worldwide.

Augustus "Gussie" Clarke (born 1954) is a Jamaican roots-reggae and dancehall producer who debuted in 1972 with U-Roy's "The Higher the Mountain." Through the 1970s he worked with Dennis Brown, Gregory Isaacs, Augustus Pablo, Leroy Smart and the Mighty Diamonds, and in 1988 opened his Music Works studio in Kingston, embracing the digital era. That studio produced the "Rumours" riddim, source of Gregory Isaacs's "Rumours" and J.C. Lodge's "Telephone Love.".

"I'm Still in Love with You Boy" by Marcia Aitken is a late-1970s female-voiced answer/version in the Alton Ellis song family, a compact example of Jamaican versioning across gendered perspectives and eras.

"I'm Still in Love," Alton Ellis's 1967 rocksteady ballad, became one of Jamaican music's most durable rhythms - reworked, versioned and sampled across reggae and dancehall for decades, including well-known dancehall re-cuts that introduced the melody to entirely new generations of listeners.

"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.

The 1985 riddim, built by Wayne Smith and Noel Davey on a Casiotone preset at King Jammy's and voiced by Smith as "Under Mi Sleng Teng", that ended the era of the live band as the default of Jamaican music. Cheap, fully electronic and instantly copyable, it triggered the digital turn: hundreds of versions followed within a few years, production costs collapsed, and dancehall's tempo, texture and economics were remade around it. Nothing else in the archive divides a before from an after so cleanly.

The riddim behind Alton Ellis's 1967 Studio One rocksteady side "I'm Still in Love With You", recut a decade later at Joe Gibbs's studio and turned into one of Jamaica's most productive version chains: Marcia Aitken's 1977 answer version, Trinity's toast "Three Piece Suit", and Althea & Donna's "Uptown Top Ranking", which reached number one in Britain in February 1978. A textbook case of one rhythm track carrying several hit records across a decade.

Arthur Reid (1915-1975), policeman turned liquor merchant, sound-system owner and producer. His Trojan sound contested the late-1950s dances with Coxsone's Downbeat, and from his Bond Street premises he built Treasure Isle into the defining rocksteady operation — Alton Ellis, the Techniques, the Paragons, Phyllis Dillon — before opening his rhythms to U-Roy's toasting in 1970 and helping launch the deejay record.

Althea & Donna's 1977 single — two Kingston teenagers over the "I'm Still in Love" rhythm, answering Trinity's "Three Piece Suit" — which reached number one in the UK in early 1978. A patois record about dressing well and taking no advice topping the British chart was without precedent, and it has kept its charm intact for nearly fifty years.

How the B-side and the mixing desk became instruments.

In Jamaican music a rhythm track is not the background to one song. It is a shared address that dozens of records live at, and it works like an index to the whole archive.

In Jamaica's foundation years the man who paid for the session owned the sound - and often the shop, the studio and the label too.

In 1950s Kingston, Coxsone Dodd's Downbeat and Duke Reid's Trojan turned rival dances into the foundation of an entire music industry.