Ten singers, players, and studio visionaries who turned the sound of Kingston into the heartbeat of the world, from ska and rocksteady through roots reggae and dub.

No island has ever exported more music per square mile than Jamaica. In the two decades after independence in 1962, a country of barely two million people invented ska, slowed it into rocksteady, deepened it into roots reggae, and then, in cramped studios in Kingston, took the songs apart again and created dub, the ancestor of the remix itself. Along the way Jamaican deejays talking over instrumental tracks laid the foundation stone of rap. Between the early 1960s and the early 1980s, the music of Trench Town and Waterhouse traveled from sound system dances to the top of the British charts, to Hollywood, and to stadiums on every continent.

Choosing ten names from that golden era means weighing influence over fame. We looked for the artists who changed how the music was made, heard, or understood, and we tried to honor the era’s full breadth: the ska originators, the crossover stars, the roots prophets, the women too often left out of the story, and the engineers whose mixing desks were instruments in their own right. A couple of these names will be familiar to everyone; one or two, we hope, will be discoveries. They appear in no particular order.

1. Prince Buster

1938-2016

Before reggae there was ska, and before almost anyone else there was Cecil Bustamente Campbell, the sound system operator who became its king. In 1960 he produced the Folkes Brothers’ “Oh Carolina,” daringly built around the Rastafarian hand drumming of Count Ossie, a sound polite Jamaican society then kept at arm’s length. His own “Al Capone” cracked the British charts in 1967 and seeded a lifelong love affair between the UK and Jamaican music: the band Madness took their name from one of his songs and their debut single, “The Prince,” was a tribute to him. Start with “Al Capone” and its strutting, gunshot-punctuated swagger.

2. Toots Hibbert

1942-2020

The genre owes Frederick “Toots” Hibbert its very name: his 1968 single with the Maytals, “Do the Reggay,” put the word on a record label for the first time. A preacher’s son with a voice often compared to Otis Redding, he won Jamaica’s first Festival Song Competition in 1966 with “Bam Bam,” then turned an unjust prison stint into “54-46 That’s My Number,” one of the most covered songs in reggae. His gospel-fired shout gave the music its soul lineage, connecting Kingston to Memphis. Start with the album Funky Kingston, and do not skip “Pressure Drop.”

3. Jimmy Cliff

1944-2025

If one work carried reggae to the world in a single stroke, it was The Harder They Come, the 1972 film in which Cliff starred as the outlaw singer Ivanhoe Martin. Its soundtrack became a gateway record for millions of listeners far beyond the Caribbean, and his own songs on it, “Many Rivers to Cross” and the title track, remain the music’s great secular hymns. He was already an international star before Bob Marley was, and in 2010 he entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, one of the few reggae artists ever inducted. Jamaica awarded him its Order of Merit. Start with The Harder They Come soundtrack, front to back.

4. Bob Marley

1945-1981

The inevitable name, and still the essential one. With the Wailers’ Catch a Fire in 1973, Marley proved a reggae album could stand beside any rock record in the world’s ears, and with Exodus in 1977, recorded in London exile after gunmen tried to kill him in Kingston, he made the album Time magazine would later name the best of the twentieth century. At the One Love Peace Concert in 1978 he pulled Jamaica’s warring political leaders, Michael Manley and Edward Seaga, into a joined-hands embrace on stage. No musician has done more to make one small island’s faith and struggle a global language. Start with Exodus, then work backward.

5. Peter Tosh

1944-1987

The Wailers’ co-founder was reggae’s sharpest edge: taller, angrier, and more confrontational than his bandmate Marley, and the co-writer of “Get Up, Stand Up,” the movement’s anthem. His 1976 solo debut Legalize It made him a fearless public advocate at a time when the stance carried real danger, and its follow-up, Equal Rights, is perhaps the most uncompromising protest album the genre ever produced. The Rolling Stones signed him to their label, and his duet with Mick Jagger on “Don’t Look Back” brought him to audiences reggae had never reached. He was murdered in his home in 1987. Start with Equal Rights.

6. Marcia Griffiths

The empress of reggae

Every phase of the era runs through Marcia Griffiths. She sang rocksteady gems at Studio One in the 1960s, took “Young, Gifted and Black” into the British top five in 1970 as half of the duo Bob and Marcia, and from 1974 anchored the I Threes, the vocal trio that carried Bob Marley’s message around the world alongside Rita Marley and Judy Mowatt. Decades later her “Electric Boogie” gave the world the Electric Slide, still danced at weddings everywhere. In a scene that rarely made room for women, she made herself indispensable to it. Start with “Feel Like Jumping,” pure Studio One joy.

7. Burning Spear

Born 1945

Winston Rodney, who records as Burning Spear, grew up in Saint Ann’s Bay, the same town that produced Marcus Garvey, and he made the Pan-Africanist leader the lifelong subject of his art. His 1975 album Marcus Garvey is roots reggae at its deepest: hypnotic, chanted, closer to ceremony than to pop. Where others wrote songs about Rastafari, Spear made records that sound like the faith itself, and his incantatory style shaped everything the roots movement became. He went on to win two Grammy awards for best reggae album. Start with Marcus Garvey, ideally paired with its dub twin, Garvey’s Ghost.

8. Lee “Scratch” Perry

1936-2021

Reggae’s mad scientist produced some of the rawest early Wailers sides, including “Duppy Conqueror” and “Small Axe,” then built his own Black Ark studio in his Kingston backyard in 1973 and turned four-track tape into an orchestra of echo, phase, and buried voodoo effects. His production of Junior Murvin’s “Police and Thieves” in 1976 became an anthem in Britain, famously covered by the Clash, and his influence runs through punk, hip-hop, and electronic music alike. He finally won a Grammy in 2003, five decades into his career. Start with Super Ape, credited to the Upsetters, his house band.

9. King Tubby

1941-1989

Osbourne Ruddock was an electronics repairman in the Waterhouse district of Kingston who never sang a note, yet he may be the most influential figure on this list after Marley. At his tiny home studio he stripped vocals from existing songs, drenched the drums and bass in reverb and echo, and invented dub: the idea that a recording is not a finished object but raw material to be transformed. Every remix, every DJ culture, every bass-heavy genre from jungle to dubstep descends from his mixing desk. Start with “King Tubbys Meets Rockers Uptown,” his 1976 masterpiece with melodica player Augustus Pablo.

10. U-Roy

The originator

Ewart Beckford, the deejay for King Tubby’s sound system, took the microphone chatter of the dancehall and turned it into an art form on record. In 1970 his singles “Wake the Town,” “Rule the Nation,” and “Wear You to the Ball” occupied the top of the Jamaican charts at the same time, something no talking deejay had ever done. Toasting, his practice of riding a rhythm with rhymed, syncopated speech, crossed to New York with Jamaican immigrants and became a taproot of hip-hop. If you have ever heard anyone rap, you have heard his descendants. Start with the album Version Galore.

Final thoughts

What unites these ten is not a style but a conviction: that music made in small rooms, on scarce equipment, by people the world had overlooked, could say something the whole world needed to hear. Between them they gave popular music the remix, the deejay, the one drop rhythm, and a moral seriousness that pop had rarely carried before. That a single island generation produced the named inventor of a genre, the founder of dub, and the grandfather of rap should astonish us more than it does.

Ten is a cruel number for a scene this rich. Desmond Dekker, whose “Israelites” topped the British charts in 1969 before most listeners could name the music’s homeland, missed this list by a whisker, and so did Dennis Brown, the honey-voiced singer crowned the crown prince of reggae. Consider them the first stops on a journey that has no real end, and let CreARTivity’s explorations of Caribbean art and culture be your map for the rest of it.