Riddim and Reign: The Women Who Shaped Reggae and Dancehall

A feature tracing the women who shaped Jamaican music across seven decades: singers, the first female producer, the I-Threes, lovers-rock pioneers, dancehall deejays and the dancehall queens.

The Women Who Held the Riddim

Jamaican music is often told as a story of men behind mixing desks and microphones, but women were present at every turning point, and sometimes out in front. It was a woman who gave the island its first true global hit: Millie Small, whose 1964 ska recording "My Boy Lollipop" reached number two in both the UK and US and reportedly sold more than seven million copies, becoming the first major success for Island Records and making Small the Caribbean's first international recording star. From that opening, the thread of women's voices runs through ska, rocksteady, roots reggae, lovers rock and dancehall without a break.

Rocksteady's Reigning Queen

As ska slowed into the cooler pulse of rocksteady in the late 1960s, Phyllis Dillon became its defining female voice. Discovered while performing in Kingston and brought to Duke Reid's Treasure Isle studio by saxophonist Tommy McCook, she cut her first single, "Don't Stay Away," in late 1966. Her 1967 reading of "Perfidia" turned her into a star, and hits like "It's Rocking Time" earned her the enduring title Queen of Rocksteady. Dillon later balanced a banking career in New York with return trips to record for Reid, and Jamaica posthumously awarded her the Order of Distinction in 2009.

The Woman Behind the Board

Women shaped the sound from the control room as well as the vocal booth. Sonia Pottinger opened her record shop in 1965 and began producing the following year, becoming Jamaica's first female record producer. Across the rocksteady and reggae eras she ran the Gay Feet and High Note labels, releasing work by the Melodians, the Ethiopians, Alton Ellis and Toots and the Maytals, and later produced Culture's acclaimed 1978 album. In an industry almost entirely run by men, she built and directed her own catalogue for nearly two decades.

Before a single roots anthem reached the world, a woman had already proven that the producer's chair in Kingston need not belong only to men.

The I-Threes and Their Solo Crowns

When Peter Tosh and Bunny Wailer left the Wailers, three singers stepped forward to become the harmonic heart of the group. Formed in 1974, the I-Threes paired Marcia Griffiths and Judy Mowatt with Rita Marley, sweetening and underlining the message on records like "Exodus," "Jammin'" and "One Love" until Bob Marley's death in 1981. Each also built a solo legacy: Mowatt's late-1970s album "Black Woman" is remembered as an early reggae record made by a woman acting as her own producer, and in 1985 she became the first female artist nominated for a reggae Grammy, while Griffiths scored the best-selling reggae single ever recorded by a woman with her 1989 version of "Electric Boogie," the song behind the Electric Slide.

Lovers Rock Crosses the Water

In Britain's Jamaican diaspora, a softer, romance-led style called lovers rock gave a new generation of women the spotlight. Its signature anthem arrived in 1979 when Janet Kay released "Silly Games," written and produced by Dennis Bovell. The single reached number two in the UK, and Kay's appearance on Top of the Pops made it the first lovers-rock record performed on the show, opening a door for British-born singers who had grown up between two musical worlds.

Dancehall's Own Queens

As reggae hardened into dancehall in the 1980s, women answered on the microphone and on the floor. In 1982 Sister Nancy cut "Bam Bam" for her album "One Two," a record widely cited as the most sampled reggae song of all time, drawn on by artists from Beyonce to Jay-Z. A decade later Lady Saw claimed the mantle of the First Lady of Dancehall, meeting the men's slackness on her own terms, headlining shows abroad, and in 2004 becoming the first female deejay to win a Grammy. Away from the mic, the dancehall queen title crowned the dancers: Carlene Smith took it in the early 1990s, and when Japan's Junko Kudo won Montego Bay's international competition in 2002, the crown proved that the culture had gone global. The line reaches into the present through Patra, Spice and Shenseea, and in 2020 Koffee became the first woman, and the youngest solo artist, to win the Grammy for Best Reggae Album.

From the rocksteady ballad to the dancehall crown, the women of Jamaican music were never a footnote to the sound; they were among the hands that built it.