Reggae Music article
The History of Reggae Music
A decade-by-decade timeline of how Jamaican music went from mento and ska to reggae, dub and dancehall — and how it ended up everywhere.
Every genre claims a neat origin story, and reggae's is more interesting than most because it actually happened in stages you can trace. From Kingston sound systems to global stadiums took roughly a decade, and every step of that journey still shapes how the music sounds today. Here's the timeline, properly laid out.
Before Reggae: Mento, Ska and Rocksteady
Jamaica had its own popular music well before reggae existed. Mento supplied the indigenous folk foundation — acoustic, rhythmic, distinctly local. Through the late 1950s and early 1960s, Jamaican musicians folded in American rhythm and blues, jazz and calypso to create ska: fast, horn-driven and built for dancing.
By the mid-1960s, ska had slowed down considerably. That slower, bass-forward style became known as rocksteady, and it lasted only a couple of years — but it did crucial groundwork, pushing the bass line into a starring role it has never really given up since.
The Late 1960s: Reggae Arrives
Reggae itself emerged directly out of that rocksteady period in the late 1960s. Toots and the Maytals' 1968 recording “Do the Reggay” is commonly cited as an early, possibly the earliest, use of the word on record, which is why the song turns up in nearly every account of the genre's naming — though the wider history of the term itself is a little less tidy than one single song.
Behind the scenes, Jamaica's sound-system culture was doing just as much to shape the new sound as any studio. Producers issued exclusive one-off recordings for their own rigs, competing directly with rival systems. That competitive, DIY environment produced the Jamaican “version” tradition — reusing a single rhythm track across multiple songs, instrumentals and vocal performances — a practice that would later become central to dancehall.
| Period | Style | What Changed |
|---|---|---|
| 1950s–early 1960s | Mento & early influence | Jamaican folk foundation meets American R&B |
| Early–mid 1960s | Ska | Fast tempo, horn-led dance music |
| Mid–late 1960s | Rocksteady | Slower tempo, bass pushed forward |
| Late 1960s onward | Reggae | One-drop rhythm, skank guitar, offbeat feel |
The 1970s: Going Global
The 1970s is when reggae's history stops being a purely Jamaican story. Bob Marley and the Wailers — alongside founding members Peter Tosh and Bunny Wailer — signed to Island Records and released a run of albums, including Catch a Fire, Burnin' and Exodus, that carried the sound to an international audience it had never reached before. Jimmy Cliff's starring role in the film The Harder They Come did similar work for reggae's reputation abroad, introducing both the music and Jamaican culture more broadly to cinema audiences outside the Caribbean.
This was also roots reggae's defining decade. Rastafarianism — a Jamaican religious and cultural movement dating back to the 1930s — shaped much of the era's lyrical content: themes of Babylon, oppression, African identity, spiritual liberation and social justice run through records by Peter Tosh, Burning Spear, Black Uhuru and Culture. For a closer look at those figures, the best reggae music artists to know covers them individually.
Dub: A Parallel History
While roots reggae was reaching stadiums, a stranger, quieter revolution was happening in Jamaican studios. Producers and engineers — King Tubby chief among them, alongside Lee “Scratch” Perry at his own Black Ark studio — began treating the mixing desk itself as an instrument, stripping tracks back to drums and bass and rebuilding them with tape echo, spring reverb and dramatic dropouts. Dub wasn't simply reggae with the vocals removed; it became its own compositional approach, and its influence on modern remix culture and studio production is hard to overstate.
The Late 1970s and Beyond: Dancehall
By the late 1970s and into the 1980s, Jamaican music's sound-system culture pushed the genre in a new direction again. Deejays — vocalists performing over instrumental riddims rather than singing in a traditional band format — came to the fore, digital production replaced live instrumentation more and more, and dancehall emerged as reggae's dominant successor on Jamaica's own sound systems, even as roots reggae's international profile continued through the decade.
Reggae's Global Legacy
Reggae's reach didn't stop at the genres carrying its own name. Its rhythms and production ideas fed into punk, new wave, hip-hop, pop, electronic music and later Caribbean and African popular styles. That international success brought its own tension too: it was often marketed abroad as relaxed, exotic background music, which risked flattening the social and political history actually driving much of it. A responsible account of reggae's history has to hold both truths — the accessible sound and the specific, often difficult context it came from.
If you want to see how that history splits into distinct sounds — roots, dub, lovers rock, dancehall and more — reggae music subgenres, explained picks up exactly where this timeline leaves off, and essential reggae music albums, explained puts specific records against each stage of the story above.
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