Reggae historian Steve Barrow credits Clancy Eccles with altering the Jamaican patois word
streggae (loose woman) into
reggae. However, Toots Hibbert said:
There's a word we used to use in Jamaica called 'streggae'. 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 its name. Before that people had called it blue-beat and all kind
of other things. Now it's in the Guinness World of Records.
Bob Marley is said to have claimed that the word
reggae came from a Spanish term for "the king's music". The liner notes of
To the King, a compilation of Christian gospel reggae, suggest that the word
reggae was derived from the Latin
regi meaning "to the king".
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