Toots Hibbert in concert, 2010. A man in a blue, leather vest singing into a microphone while playing the guitar.
4 May 2022
Reggae is a style of Jamaican music that Cassidy and Le Page’s Dictionary of Jamaican English defines as:
A type of music developed in Jamaica about 1964, based on ska, and usually having a heavy four-beat rhythm, using the bass, electric guitar, and drum, with the scraper coming in at the end of the measure and acting as accompaniment to emotional songs often expressing rejection of established “white-man” culture.
The name reggae, however, appears a few years after the musical style started to be played, coined by Frederick “Toots” Hibbert in his 1968 song Do the Reggay:
I got a rich one (yeah)
Do you love me? (yeah)
Do you really want me? (yeah)
with all your heart (yeah)
I want to do the reggay (yeah)
With you (yeah)
Come onto me (Let's)
Do the dance (yeah)Is this the new dance? (yeah)
Going around the town? (yeah)
We can move you baby (then)
Do the reggay
Do the reggay
Reggay reggay reggay
La la la la la laaaa
And the earliest known appearance in print of the name is in an advertisement in Kingston, Jamaica’s Daily Gleaner on 7 September 1968 for a band that was covering Hibbert’s song:
TONIGHT! TONIGHT!
THE “BOSS” SOUND
is back at the RAINBOW CLUB
with a
360° SOUND HAPPENINGJAMAICA’S GREATEST
Sonny Wong Victor Wong Derrick Herriot “The Preacher”
Skaing Souls[?]-Crazy Mood
This Music Got SoulTHE MIGHTY VIKINGS
Come do this
Brand New Dance
THE REGGAEHear these new Fab. Tunes:
• Don’t tell to Mary
• Watch the sound
• Love makes a woman
• Lovers Holiday
• Red Red wine
• Reggae
• Got the Rhythm
Reggae is probably a spelling variant of the Jamaican dialectical word rege-rege or raga-raga, meaning rags or raggedy clothing. Cassidy and Le Page’s dictionary cites citations from 1954 for rege-rege and 1943 for raga-raga. This etymology is backed up by Hibbert himself, who in 2004 recounted how he came up with the lyric and song title:
Hibbert says his naming of the genre on the 1968 single “Do The Reggay” was pure accident. “There’s a word we used to use in Jamaica called ‘streggae’,” he recalls. “If a girl is walking and the guys look at her and say ‘Man, she’s streggae’ it means she don’t dress well, she look raggedy. The girls would say that about the men too. This one morning me and my two friends were playing and I said, ‘OK man, let’s do the reggay.’ It was just something that came out of my mouth. So we just start singing ‘Do the reggay, do the reggay’ and created a beat. People tell me later that we had given the sound it’s [sic] name. Before that people called it blue-beat and all kind of other things. Now it’s in the Guinness World of Records.”
But others have pointed to another sense that could have been the origin, that of rege-rege meaning an argument or quarrel. This proposed origin is apt because as many reggae songs address racial inequality and the problems of a post-colonial society. Cassidy and Le Page also refer to a possible connection to ragtime, reggae being a distinctly Jamaican style of Black music with syncopated rhythm. This explanation does not necessarily preclude Hibbert’s account being accurate; the argument sense may have influenced the adoption of Hibbert’s lyric as the name for the style.
Sources:
Advertisement. The Daily Gleaner (Kingston, Jamaica), 7 September 1968, 6. Newspaper Archive.com.
Cassidy, Frederic Gomes and Robert Brock Le Page, eds. A Dictionary of Jamaican English, second edition (1980). Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2002, s.v. rege-rege; n., raga-raga, n. and adj.; reggae, n. ProQuest: Caribbean Literature.
Hibbert, Frederick “Toots.” “Do the Reggay.” Beverley’s/Pyramid Records, 1968. Lyrics.com.
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, December 2009, s.v. reggae, n.
Sturges, Fiona. “The Reggae King of Kingston.” Independent (London), 4 June 2004, 18–19. Gale Primary Sources: The Independent Historical Archive.
Photo credit: Karl Simpson, 2010. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.