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 bass line, tight drums and trombone melody have carried roots singers, dancehall deejays and UK jungle alike. The keyboard plays fills rather than the hook, and which keyboard is not documented: the accounts that name a model say Hammond, a reader who knows the record says Farfisa Compact, and no session paperwork has been read either way.

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 in Kingston) started where a lot of Jamaican producers started and most did not leave: cutting dubplates for other people's sounds. He made his own production debut in 1972 with U-Roy's "The Higher the Mountain", and within two years had established himself as the deejay album's most serious producer, with Big Youth's Screaming Target and I-Roy's Presenting I Roy — two records routinely named among the best the form has produced. Through the 1970s and early 1980s he issued much of his work on his own Gussy and Puppy labels, working with Dennis Brown, Gregory Isaacs, Augustus Pablo, Leroy Smart and the Mighty Diamonds. In 1988 he opened Music Works in Kingston, a studio built to a standard the island had rarely had, and used it to meet the digital era on his own terms rather than being overtaken by it. The Rumours riddim came out of that room: Gregory Isaacs's "Rumours" was the biggest record in Jamaica in the summer of 1988, and J.C. Lodge's "Telephone Love", voiced on the same rhythm, became the biggest reggae hit in the United States that year. He also produced Shabba Ranks at the point Shabba became an international act. He received the Musgrave Medal in 2014 and was made a Commander of the Order of Distinction in 2019. He gave Bradley a pointed critique of the wave of major American label deals in the early 1990s, Super Cat to CBS, Shabba Ranks to Epic, Buju Banton to Phonogram/Mercury among them, arguing the deals failed most artists because majors pulled them out of Jamaica for extended periods, by which point they had lost their domestic market, and because too many artists and producers spent advance money without reinvesting enough in the follow-up record's quality. He summarised his own philosophy as prioritising a record's staying power over the size of any single advance, on the reasoning that a company that gets a strong first record will commission more.

"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 "Duke" Reid (21 July 1915 - January 1975) served ten years as a Jamaican police officer before leaving the force to help his wife Lucille run the family business, the Treasure Isle Grocery and Liquor Store at 33 Bond Street in Kingston — and it is worth pausing on that sequence, because almost everything he became grew out of a shop. The sound system he ran through the 1950s was among the island's most popular, and the name he took for himself, the Trojan, is generally traced to the British-built trucks that carried his equipment. He contested the late-1950s dances with Coxsone's Downbeat, and was crowned King of Sounds and Blues three years running. He built the studio above the store, and named the label after it: Treasure Isle. What came out of that room defined rocksteady — cool, unhurried, elegantly arranged — through Alton Ellis and the Flames, the Techniques, the Paragons, Justin Hinds and the Dominoes, Stranger Cole, the Jamaicans, the Melodians and Phyllis Dillon. Then, at the turn of the 1970s, he did the thing that mattered most for everything after: he opened his own rocksteady rhythms to the toasting of U-Roy and Dennis Alcapone, and in doing so helped invent the deejay record. He performed the part as well, presiding over toasting contests in an ermine cloak with a gilt crown. He died in January 1975, having sold Treasure Isle to Sonia Pottinger the year before.

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.