My All-Time Favourite Reggae Artists

In the welcome post of my blog, I said I wouldn’t bother you with too many details about myself, but when I started doing a research for an article about the greatest reggae artists and songs, I changed my mind. The reason for this is that I saw that I cannot contribute much to what’s already out there. If you google-search ‘greatest reggae artists’, you’ll find more than enough great articles rankings pretty much the same singers as the top 10 in the genre: Bob Marley always at the top (duh!), then Toots, Gregory Isaacs, Peter Tosh, Jimmy Cliff, Tanya Stephens, Burning Spear and so on. On top of that, on Wikipedia you can find a pretty exhaustive list of notable reggae musicians which can help you expand your reggae horizons by exploring the music of artists you maybe haven’t heard of before. In this case, only sharing my personal story of how I got hooked on reggae music, which are my favourite reggae artists and which are the reggae songs that are closest to my heart would have any value to at least some of the visitors. So that’s exactly what I will write about in this article. Here it goes.

The Beginning

I was in my early teens and those were the times when it wasn’t that common for a household to have more than one TV, one stereo system and one computer. And them being in pretty much the same room, you had to choose something that fits everyone’s taste. Not an easy task when one family member listens to folk, the other – to pop, the third – to rap, and the last one – to heavy metal. We had countless fights as to what music we should play and it was almost impossible for everyone to be happy at the same time. Until one day I randomly put Bob Marley on. Not a single complaint! Everyone went about their business humming and with a dancing step. Same happened a few days later with UB40. This is pretty much how I started listening to reggae regularly and discovered that I simply love the genre.

From Reggae to Ragga and Dancehall

Since these early days of my journey in exploring reggae music, I’ve fallen in love with countless reggae artists – be it the classic or the more contemporary ones – and their songs. Every time I hear Tanya Stephen’s It’s a Pity I immediately start singing. In my playlist, you will always find Black Roses by Barrington Levy, Night Nurse by Gregory Isaacs, Don’t Break My Heart and The Earth Dies Screaming by UB40, Shaggy’s Oh, Carolina, Murder She Wrote by Chaka Demus & Pliers, Why Am I a Rastaman by Culture and many more. Whenever I hear Sister Nancy’s Bam Bam or No No No I cannot stop myself from dancing. I can’t help myself but love Boom Bye Bye by Buju Banton even though I’m not exactly OK with what the song is about. Other songs from him that I will always like are Champion and Wanna Be Loved. I simply adore 54 46

by Toots which, by the way, has an awesome cover by Sublime who were, obviously, heavily influenced by reggae music. I also started listening to reggae’s subgenres ragga and dancehall and its precursor – ska. There are so many great artists in those genres – Beenie Man, Mr Vegas, Elephant Man, Capleton, Sizzla, to mention but a few. But no matter how many great artists there are in the genre, there will always be one name that will outshine them all. Guess who!