Do the Reggay named Jamaica’s slow-downbeat sound in 1968
Reggae rose in late-1960s Jamaica from mento, ska, and rocksteady, then travelled with the diaspora. Toots and the Maytals’ 1968 single Do the Reggay first put the word on a hit. The beat is slower than ska or rocksteady, with heavy downbeat bass-and-drum weight and clipped offbeat guitar or piano chords.
Roots reach Kumina, Nyabinghi, burru, and related drumming, plus American rhythm and blues and jazz. Vocals often ride Jamaican Patois, English, or Iyaric; lyrics move from politics and faith to love and leisure. From the 1970s, international hits carried Rastafari’s pan-African message, casting musicians as messengers. Panama’s reggae en Español and British Caribbean scenes spun local fusions.
The 1967 Dictionary of Jamaican English linked reggae to rege-rege—rags or a quarrel. Steve Barrow credits Clancy Eccles with twisting streggae into reggae; Toots Hibbert recalled joking “let’s do the reggay” from that raggedy slang. Bob Marley floated a Spanish “king’s music” story; gospel compilations even cite Latin regi. Early bona fide reggae sides include Larry Marshall’s Nanny Goat and the Beltones’ No More Heartaches around early 1968.
Ska had ruled after independence in 1962 with walking bass and horn punch; mid-decade rocksteady slowed tempos and softened horns—one tale blames Hopeton Lewis’s Take It Easy. The Wailers—Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, Bunny Wailer—crossed all three stages from 1963 onward. Retail singles and specialist shops reduced sole dependence on sound systems, letting the rhythm section’s thick low end define a global template. Rocksteady’s slower rhythms later became the backbone of many reggae tracks, leaving room for the double skank on the offbeat. Producers such as King Tubby, Duke Reid, Coxsone Dodd, Joe Gibbs, Leslie Kong and Lee Perry steered the transition. In Britain, Jamaican immigrants first bought the music through small import businesses, and Chris Blackwell, having launched Island Records in Jamaica in 1960, relocated to England two years later to keep promoting it; British licensees often overdubbed strings onto releases, to the dismay of the original artists. Bob Marley’s 1980 visit to Zimbabwe lifted the genre’s profile across Africa.
Source: Reggae
