Women in the control room and on the mic

Sonia Pottinger produced hits for two decades and ended up owning Treasure Isle. Phyllis Dillon defined rocksteady singing. Marcia Griffiths has had hits in five decades. Sister Nancy made one of the most sampled records in the world. This is the part of the history that gets shortened to a list of vocalists.

The producer

Sonia Pottinger began producing in Kingston in the mid-1960s and did not stop for twenty years. Her Tip Top and Gay Feet labels carried rocksteady, reggae and roots (the Melodians, Delroy Wilson, Culture, Marcia Griffiths, Bob Andy) and she is generally recognised as the first woman to run a recording operation on the island. She was not an exception permitted at the edges of the business; she was one of its significant producers for two decades.

The clearest measure of her standing is what happened when Duke Reid fell ill in the mid-1970s: he sold her the Treasure Isle catalogue. One of the two foundational bodies of Jamaican recorded music passed to a woman who had built her own company from nothing, and she managed and reissued it for years afterwards.

Patricia Chin's route was different and ended somewhere comparable. She and her husband Vincent ran Randy's on North Parade with its studio upstairs, and after they left for New York the label they founded in Queens in 1979 (VP, from their initials) became the largest independent reggae operation in the world. She remained active in it for decades, and the initial in the name is hers.

The voices that stayed in print

Phyllis Dillon recorded for Treasure Isle from 1967, and the rocksteady she sang there ("Don't Stay Away", "Perfidia") remains the reference point for the style's vocal poise. Hortense Ellis, sister of Alton, worked across ska, rocksteady and reggae and won national popularity contests in Jamaica while never getting the international run her voice warranted.

Marcia Griffiths has had hits in five different decades, which almost nobody in any genre manages. She recorded at Studio One as a teenager, made "Young, Gifted and Black" with Bob Andy in 1970, sang with the I-Threes behind Bob Marley from 1974, and cut "Electric Boogie", the record that produced the Electric Slide, a line dance now performed by people with no idea it is Jamaican.

The I-Threes are usually filed as accompaniment, which undersells all three. Judy Mowatt's Black Woman, released in 1979, was largely written and directed by her and stands as one of the first reggae albums of its stature shaped throughout by a woman. Rita Marley sang on it, ran her own recording career, and afterwards managed one of the most valuable catalogues in popular music.

On the microphone

Deejaying was treated as men's work for its first decade, and Sister Nancy went round it. "Bam Bam", voiced on the Stalag rhythm in 1982 for Winston Riley, is now among the most sampled records to come out of Jamaica, turning up under hip-hop, pop and advertising for forty years. She toured internationally as a deejay when there was essentially no precedent for a woman doing so.

The exclusion had a precise shape, and it was not simply about the microphone. Through the 1980s women were attached to sound systems as performers, and essentially never as the selector, the operator or the owner. They could be booked; they could not run the set. That is the same pattern this story finds in the studio, women reached the roles that produce a credit and stopped at the ones that confer control, and it is why the counteraction records of 1987 mattered so much. A record was the one credential a woman could obtain without anyone's permission.

Dancehall from the 1990s onward has been shaped throughout by women, on the microphone and on the floor. Lady Saw built a career that included a Grammy-winning guest appearance on No Doubt's "Underneath It All", honoured at the 2004 awards, and later moved to gospel under her own name, Marion Hall. Tanya Stephens wrote sharper social criticism than most of her male contemporaries were attempting. Carlene Smith's crowning as Dancehall Queen made the dancer a named public figure rather than an anonymous part of the scene.

The line runs to the present. Koffee won the Grammy for Best Reggae Album in 2020 for Rapture, the first woman to take the category on her own and the youngest winner in it. Spice, Shenseea and others have built international audiences on terms they largely set themselves, through video and streaming rather than a licensing house in London.

What the credits missed

The pattern is consistent enough to be structural rather than incidental. Where a role was printed on the label, singer, women appear throughout the history. Where it was not (producer, arranger, catalogue owner, booking agent, the person who decided which session happened) they appear too, but only if somebody went looking. Reading this part of the archive means treating the absence of a credit as a question rather than an answer.