The Ministry of Tourism and Entertainment is moving to provide protection for one of the island’s foremost indigenous music forms, reggae.
State Minister, Hon. Damion Crawford, said the Ministry is working with the Ministries of Industry, Investment and Commerce, Youth and Culture, and the Jamaica Intellectual Property Office (JIPO), in preparing a Cabinet submission towards that objective.
Mr. Crawford, said that reggae can be protected under the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage.
He said UNESCO’s formal recognition of reggae as a traditional cultural expression and art form of Jamaica, would better enable Jamaica to maintain control over the definition, recognition and identification of the musical form.
“This would protect the reggae genre and have the effect of ensuring that more of the economic wealth, moral rights, trade mark and geographically linked benefits, flowing from the use of, indication or designation reggae, would be retained in and with Jamaica,” he stated.
The State Minister further asserted that the recognition of reggae, as distinctly Jamaican, would attract funding towards the preservation and maintenance of traditional reggae art forms and practitioners.
There is also the potential to attract more investors as well as visitors to Jamaica who wish to pilgrim to the ‘Mecca’ of authentic reggae,” he said.
Via PL
The song below by the Maytals and producer Leslie Kong, is credited as being the first of several songs released in 1968 to first use the word “reggae” (spelled at the time “reggay”) in a Jamaican recording.