Grammy Award for Best Reggae Album
The Grammy Award for Best Reggae Album is an award presented at the Grammy Awards, a ceremony that was established in 1985 and originally called the Gramophone Awards, to recording artists for quality works in the reggae music genre. Honors in several categories are presented at the ceremony annually by the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences of the United States to "honor artistic achievement, technical proficiency and overall excellence in the recording industry, without regard to album sales or chart position".
1986 award recipient Jimmy Cliff in 1997
Five-time award winner Stephen Marley (three times as a member of the band Ziggy Marley and the Melody Makers) in 2007
Six-time award winner Ziggy Marley (three times as the leader of his eponymous band), performing at the Austin City Limits Music Festival in 2007
Three-time award winner Bunny Wailer, performing in 2009
Reggae is a music genre that originated in Jamaica in the late 1960s. The term also denotes the modern popular music of Jamaica and its diaspora. A 1968 single by Toots and the Maytals, "Do the Reggay", was the first popular song to use the word reggae, effectively naming the genre and introducing it to a global audience. While sometimes used in a broad sense to refer to most types of popular Jamaican dance music, the term reggae more properly denotes a particular music style that was strongly influenced by traditional mento as well as by American jazz and rhythm and blues, and evolved out of the earlier genres ska and rocksteady. Reggae usually relates news, social gossip, and political commentary. It is instantly recognizable from the counterpoint between the bass and drum downbeat and the offbeat rhythm section. The immediate origins of reggae were in ska and rocksteady; from the latter, reggae took over the use of the bass as a percussion instrument.
Reggae artist Bob Marley in 1980
Jimmy Cliff
Peter Tosh with Robbie Shakespeare, 1978
Tanya Stephens in 2014 at a German Reggae festival