Reggaeis a music genre first developed in Jamaica in the late 1960s. While sometimes used in a broader sense to refer to most types of Jamaican music, the term reggae more properly denotes a particular music style that originated following on the development of ska and rocksteady.

Roots reggae is the kind of reggae, which dominated from around 1972 to circa 1984. Roots reggae is spiritually united with the Rastafarian movement's "Back to Africa message," awareness of the slave descendants captivity in Babylon, and, of course, the belief in one on earth living God, Jah, manifested as Ethiopia's Emperor Haile Selassie. Recurrent lyrical themes include poverty and resistance to government and racial oppression. The two drum styles One drop and Rockers are associated with Roots reggae, especially One drop. The creative pinnacle of roots reggae was in the late 1970s[citation needed] with singers such as Burning Spear, Max Romeo, Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, Bunny Wailer, The Abyssinians, Horace Andy, Ijahman Levi, Jacob Miller, Big Youth, and Linval Thompson, and bands like Culture, Israel Vibration, Third World, the Meditations, Aswad, Steel Pulse, Misty in Roots, Black Uhuru and the 70s version of Inner Circle, teaming up with various studio producers including Lee 'Scratch' Perry, King Tubby, Winston Holness (Niney the Observer), Bunny Lee and Gussie Clarke. Many producers looked upon the mixing desk as an instrument, manipulating tracks to come up with something new and different. Musically, on the song "Roots, Rock, Reggae" (Rastaman Vibration, 1976) Marley devised a new style of "off beat" music where a bar of six beats is played, with the guitar skanking on the fourth and sixth beat. Although entirely separate from the beats of ska, rock steady, flyers, dubstep, ragga, conscious dancehall and all later styles, this unique beat seems to have been so closely associated with Marley that few others adopted it.

Reggae is based on a rhythmic style characterized by accents on the off-beat, known as the skank. Reggae is normally slower than both ska and rocksteady.[1] Reggae usually accents the second and fourth beat in each bar, with the rhythm guitar also either emphasizing the third beat or holding the chord on the second beat until the fourth is played. It is mainly this "third beat", its speed and the use of complex bass lines that differentiated reggae from rocksteady, although later styles incorporated these innovations separately.

Reggae developed from ska, mento and R&B music in the 1960s. The shift from rocksteady to reggae was illustrated by the organ shuffle, which was pioneered by Bunny Lee and was featured in the transitional singles "Say What You're Saying" (1967) by Clancy Eccles, and "People Funny Boy" (1968) by Lee "Scratch" Perry. The Pioneers' 1967 track "Long Shot Bus' Me Bet" has been identified as the earliest recorded example of the new rhythm sound that became known as reggae.

The Wailers, a band started by Bob Marley, Peter Tosh and Bunny Wailer in 1963, are perhaps the most recognised band that made the transition through all three stages of early Jamaican popular music: ska, rocksteady and reggae. Other significant reggae pioneers include Prince Buster, Desmond Dekker and Jackie Mittoo.

Notable Jamaican producers who were influential in the development of ska into rocksteady and reggae include: Coxsone Dodd, Lee "Scratch" Perry, Leslie Kong, Duke Reid, Joe Gibbs and King Tubby. Chris Blackwell, who founded Island Records in Jamaica in 1960, relocated to England in 1962, where he continued to promote Jamaican music. He formed a partnership with Trojan Records, founded by Lee Gopthal in 1968. Trojan released recordings by reggae artists in the UK until 1974, when Saga bought the label.

Reggae is either played in 4/4 time or swing time, because the symmetrical rhythmic pattern does not lend itself to other time signatures such as 3/4 time. Harmonically, the music is often very simple, and sometimes a whole song will have no more than one or two chords. These simple repetitive chord structures add to reggae's sometimes hypnotic effects.

Reggae drumbeats fall into three main categories: One drop, Rockers and Steppers. With the One drop, the emphasis is entirely on the third beat of the bar (usually on the snare, or as a rim shot combined with bass drum). Beat one is completely empty, which is unusual in popular music. There is some controversy about whether reggae should be counted so that this beat falls on three, or whether it should be counted half as fast, so it falls on two and four. An example played by Barrett can be heard in the Bob Marley and the Wailers song. One Drop. Barrett often used an unusual triplet cross-rhythm on the hi-hat, which can be heard on many recordings by Bob Marley and the Wailers, such as "Running Away" on the Kaya album.