STORY · GLOBAL
Reggae goes global
Probable
How Jamaican music crossed the water without leaving home.
Through labels, films and touring, reggae reached a worldwide audience while local scenes kept inventing.
Chris Blackwell, who founded Island Records in Jamaica in 1959 and had been recording ska from its earliest days, is often called the person most responsible for bringing reggae to a worldwide audience. When Bob Marley visited Island's London office in 1972 looking for money to press a single, Blackwell instead advanced the Wailers an unusual sum - about £4,000 - to record a full album. The result, "Catch a Fire" (1973), reworked raw Jamaican session tapes with overdubbed rock guitar, packaging the music for international rock audiences without erasing its Jamaican core. The gamble worked: by the mid-1970s Marley's albums were charting in the US and UK, reggae had moved from a Jamaica-only export to a genre with global reach, and Island's roster and distribution networks carried other Jamaican artists along the same route.
Reggae's international breakthrough via Blackwell/Island/Marley: Wikipedia (Chris Blackwell); Britannica on Island Records. Marley and Island are the best-documented route reggae took to a global audience, but not the only one - UK sound systems, Trojan Records and independent touring also carried Jamaican music abroad in parallel, and deserve their own coverage.