Reggae Music
Posted by rooschrock on December 27, 2008
By defintion Reggae is the popular music of Jamaican origin having elements of calypso and rhythm and blues, characterized by a strongly accentuated offbeat. Started in the 1960’s, during a time of radical political and cultural change. Reggae emerged with a sound so unique and rythmic, it’s popularity grew immensely. The Reggae beat is considered, the heartbeat of the people.
In the 1967 edition of the Dictionary of Jamaican English lists reggae as “a recently estab. sp. for rege”, as in rege-rege, a word that can mean either “rags, ragged clothing” or “a quarrel, a row”.
The word reggae as a musical term first appeared in print with the 1968 rocksteady hit “DotheReggay” by The Maytals, but it was already being used in Kingston, Jamaica as the name of a slower dance and style of rocksteady. As Reggae artist Derrick Morgan stated:
We didn’t like the name rock steady, so I tried a different version of “Fat Man”. It changed the beat again, it used the organ to creep. Bunny Lee, the producer, liked that. He created the sound with the organ and the rhythm guitar. It sounded like ‘reggae, reggae’ and that name just took off. Bunny Lee started using the world [sic] and soon all the musicians were saying ‘reggae, reggae, reggae.
Reggae historian Steve Barrow credits Clancy Eccles with altering the Jamaican patois word streggae (”loose woman”) into reggae. However, Toots Hibbert said:
There’s a word we used to use in Jamaica called ’streggae’. If a girl is walking and the guys look at her and say ‘Man, she’s streggae’ it means she don’t dress well, she look raggedy. The girls would say that about the men too. This one morning me and my two friends were playing and I said, ‘OK man, let’s do the reggay.’ It was just something that came out of my mouth. So we just start singing ‘Do the reggay, do the reggay’ and created a beat. People tell me later that we had given the sound it’s [sic] name. Before that people had called it blue-beat and all kind of other things. Now it’s in the Guinness World of Records.
Bob Marley is said to have claimed that the word reggae came from a Spanish term for “the king’s music”.The liner notes of To the King, a compilation of Christian gospel reggae, suggest that the word reggae was derived from the Latin regis meaning “to the king.”
The Wailers, a band that was started by Bob Marley, Bunny Livingston, and Peter Tosh, in 1963, are generally agreed to be the most easily recognised group worldwide that made the transition through all three stages — from ska hits like “Simmer Down”, through slower rocksteady; and they are also among the significant pioneers who can be called the roots of reggae — along with Prince Buster, Desmond Dekker/Decker, Jackie Mittoo and several others.
