Origin of the Word Reggae

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hey, is this Martha?

This is Martha. Who’s this?

This is Tyler from New York.

Hey, Tyler.

How’s it going?

Hi, Tyler. What’s up?

So I started listening to your show a few weeks back. I just want to say I’m a big fan.

Yay!

So I noticed in between segments you guys play some awesome music in your sort of musical interludes between segments. I noticed you guys play some reggae, particularly Toots and the Maytails.

I was wondering about the term reggae. I’ve heard somewhere that Pete Tibbert helped popularize the term reggae through his song Do the Reggae. I wasn’t sure if they actually coined the term or whether they just popularized it. I was wondering if you could provide some background there.

Oh, that’s a really good question. First, let’s talk about the music that we play in between the segments. That is all picked by our engineer and editor, Tim Felten.

Tim is a core member of the band, the Surefire Soul Ensemble. He has an incredible music collection. He plays organs.

Yeah, he’s a wonderful keyboardist. He’s like 50 organs in his house. I don’t even know. It’s a lot of keys in his house.

Oh, wow.

It’s good music, and he’s got good taste, and that’s what you’re hearing.

All the music on the show is picked by Tim Felten of Surefire Soul Ensemble.

Yeah, you can find his work online.

Yeah, by the way, if people don’t know, we do list the music that we play on the show on our website.

So just look for the most recent episode and we’ll have a list at the end of the episode description.

So the term reggae, so it’s really interesting.

So Toots Hibbert of Toots and the Maytals gave an interview in 2004 where he talked about the term reggae.

And they specifically asked him about the credit that sometimes people give him for corning the term reggae.

Now, the song was called Do the Reggae, and it was spelled R-E-G-G-A-Y instead of an E for the Y.

This reggae is usually spelled today.

And he says, there’s a word we used to use in Jamaica called stregge, S-T-R-E-G-G-A-E.

If a girl is walking and the guys look at her and say, man, she’s stregge, 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, okay, man, let’s do the reggae.

It was just something that came out of my mouth.

So we’d just start singing, do the reggae, do the reggae, and created a beat.

People tell me later that we had given the sound its name.

Before that, people had called it Blue Beat and all kinds of other things.

Blue Beat, like the color?

Yeah, like the color, B-L-U-E-B-E-A-T, Blue Beat.

And so it is the first use that we know of the term reggae is his song from 1968.

That is awesome.

What a great story.

Yeah, but there is another term in Jamaican English called reggae-reggae, R-E-G hyphen R-E-G, and it has to do with raggedy clothing, and it’s probably etymologically related to streggae, and then therefore to reggae, but it kind of just kind of reconfirms how you could easily missay or mispronounce streggae because of these other existing words in Jamaican English that have to do with the similar idea of somebody looking slovenly.

Oh, nice. I’ll have to add stregay to my vocabulary, I guess.

If you are interested in Jamaican English, and I encourage you to get into it because it’s super interesting. It’s just like American English. It’s got this rich history of immigration and politics and all this stuff.

There’s a dictionary of Jamaican English from 1967. While it is a little out of date and hasn’t been updated since then, it still really lays down a lot of the fundamentals about how Jamaican English is different from all the other Englishes in the world.

Well, if it’s from 1967, then it doesn’t have reggae in it?

That’s right.

It doesn’t.

Well, no, I’m sorry. What it does have is it has older words that may have influenced reggae.

Right.

Yeah.

Well, thanks so much, guys.

You’re welcome.

Our pleasure.

Thank you for calling. Really appreciate it.

Take care now.

All right.

Have a good one.

Take care.

Bye, Tyler.

Toots Hibbert may have coined the term. It sounds pretty like there’s nobody arguing that he coined the term as we know it today to refer to the music.

That’s so interesting to me because I would have assumed that it was much older than that.

Right, like the music itself was much older, but the name for the music was new.

Yeah, Blue Beat and other things.

877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org.