How did reggae music develop?
Reggae got its start in the late ’60s and early ’70s. Everyone knows that Bob Marley was the king of reggae, and he took it all over the world. But reggae also had its predecessors. There was an indigenous Jamaican music that developed in the ’40s and ’50s. First it was minto, which was a more European kind of music played with a banjo, tambourine and drums. There was a music called ska, and this was truly a people’s music. Ska began to make inroads in England in the ’50s, when a lot of Jamaicans migrated to England. Reggae was also influenced by an African drumming tradition known as buru, music that came from the period of slavery and was generally practiced among the lowest classes of ghetto dwellers in Kingston. The Rastas at the time made common cause with the Buru people, which later became Nyahbinghi drumming.
