Riddim and Reign: The Women Who Shaped Reggae and Dancehall

A feature tracing the women who shaped Jamaican music across seven decades: singers, the first female producer, the I-Threes, lovers-rock pioneers, dancehall deejays and the dancehall queens.

The Women Who Held the Riddim

Jamaican music is often told as a story of men behind mixing desks and microphones, but women were present at every turning point, and sometimes out in front. It was a woman who gave the island its first true global hit: Millie Small, whose 1964 ska recording "My Boy Lollipop" reached number two in both the UK and US and reportedly sold more than seven million copies, becoming the first major success for Island Records and making Small the Caribbean's first international recording star. From that opening, the thread of women's voices runs through ska, rocksteady, roots reggae, lovers rock and dancehall without a break.

Rocksteady's Reigning Queen

As ska slowed into the cooler pulse of rocksteady in the late 1960s, Phyllis Dillon became its defining female voice. Discovered while performing in Kingston and brought to Duke Reid's Treasure Isle studio by saxophonist Tommy McCook, she cut her first single, "Don't Stay Away," in late 1966. Her 1967 reading of "Perfidia" turned her into a star, and hits like "It's Rocking Time" earned her the enduring title Queen of Rocksteady. Dillon later balanced a banking career in New York with return trips to record for Reid, and Jamaica posthumously awarded her the Order of Distinction in 2009.

The Woman Behind the Board

Women shaped the sound from the control room as well as the vocal booth. Sonia Pottinger opened her record shop in 1965 and began producing the following year, becoming Jamaica's first female record producer. Across the rocksteady and reggae eras she ran the Gay Feet and High Note labels, releasing work by the Melodians, the Ethiopians, Alton Ellis and Toots and the Maytals, and later produced Culture's acclaimed 1978 album. In an industry almost entirely run by men, she built and directed her own catalogue for nearly two decades.

The I-Threes and Their Solo Crowns

When Peter Tosh and Bunny Wailer left the Wailers, three singers stepped forward to become the harmonic heart of the group. Formed in 1974, the I-Threes paired Marcia Griffiths and Judy Mowatt with Rita Marley, sweetening and underlining the message on records like "Exodus," "Jammin'" and "One Love" until Bob Marley's death in 1981. Each also built a solo legacy: Mowatt's late-1970s album "Black Woman" is remembered as an early reggae record made by a woman acting as her own producer, and she became the first female artist nominated for a reggae Grammy, for Working Wonders, while Griffiths scored the best-selling reggae single ever recorded by a woman with her 1989 version of "Electric Boogie," the song behind the Electric Slide.

Lovers Rock Crosses the Water

In Britain's Jamaican diaspora, a softer, romance-led style called lovers rock gave a new generation of women the spotlight. Its signature anthem arrived in 1979 when Janet Kay released "Silly Games," written and produced by Dennis Bovell. The single reached number two in the UK, and Kay's appearance on Top of the Pops is widely described as the first time a lovers-rock record was performed on the show, opening a door for British-born singers who had grown up between two musical worlds.

Dancehall's Own Queens

As reggae hardened into dancehall in the 1980s, women answered on the microphone and on the floor. In 1982 Sister Nancy cut "Bam Bam" for her album "One Two," a record widely cited as the most sampled reggae song of all time, drawn on by artists from Beyonce to Jay-Z. A decade later Lady Saw claimed the mantle of the First Lady of Dancehall, meeting the men's slackness on her own terms, headlining shows abroad, and appearing on No Doubt's "Underneath It All", which took Best Pop Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal at the 2004 Grammys. Away from the mic, the dancehall queen title crowned the dancers: Carlene Smith took it in the early 1990s, and when Japan's Junko Kudo won Montego Bay's international competition in 2002, the crown proved that the culture had gone global. The line reaches into the present through Patra, Spice and Shenseea, and in 2020 Koffee became the youngest winner of the Grammy for Best Reggae Album and the first woman to take it on her own.

How the women got in: the counteraction

The route in was not a slow softening of attitudes. It was a format. Through the mid-1980s a few sounds began carrying women (Black Scorpio had Shelly Thunder and then Lady G, Jammy's sometimes had Sister Maureen, and in New York Sister Carol worked with Jah Life's Hi-Fi) but the numbers stayed small. What changed things in 1987 was the counteraction: a woman took a popular record by a male deejay and answered it, over the same rhythm, from the other side of the argument.

Junie Ranks described the mechanism plainly: what put female deejays out there was coming with a song somebody had already done and saying no to it. When Echo Minott had a hit with "What the Hell the Police Can Do", Lady Junie answered it. When Admiral Bailey made a demand, Junie Ranks and Lady Junie both refused it on the same riddim. Audiences loved the exchange, and a hit record was what made a woman credible enough to be accepted in the dance in the first place.

The version economy is usually told as men repeating each other. It was also the door women used to answer back — on the same rhythm, in public, where the argument could be settled by the crowd.

That is worth stating precisely, because this archive documents version chains elsewhere as a producer's economy, one rhythm, many records. In the late 1980s it was also a political instrument. A shared riddim meant a woman did not need a producer to build her a platform; she needed the rhythm everyone already knew and something to say back over it. Sister Charmaine, Lady Junie and Junie Ranks made the case together in a single year.

It could be dangerous. Lady Ann's "Shine Eye Boy" (Roots Tradition, 1980) answered Barrington Levy's "Shine Eye Girl", and it did well enough in England that its producer took it as an attack on his artist; she had to keep out of the dancehall and avoid him. Ann also described the ordinary hazard that shaped who could take part at all, that getting home from a dance was unsafe enough that she went only when men she trusted would carry her back to her gate. The barrier was not only that women were unwelcome on the microphone. It was that the room was risky to reach.

Ann was the first woman to be voted Best Deejay of the Year by Rockers International, and the only female deejay Coxsone Dodd recorded, though that material was never finished or released, which is its own comment. Lady G, born Janice Fyffe, kept a foot in each decade, carrying the pioneers' opening into the far more assertive women deejays of the 1990s, and answering harassment directly on record.

From the rocksteady ballad to the dancehall crown, the women of Jamaican music were never a footnote to the sound; they were among the hands that built it.