Various Artists

The mid-1900s saw a mass emigration of Jamaicans to England. It was there, after one or two generations of British-Jamaicans had developed, that reggae’s sub-genre of “lovers rock” was born. In the 1970s, as Jamaica’s reggae reached out to the world with accounts of third-world strife, the British movement actually recalled times before dreadlocks and Rasta had adopted reggae, when Jamaican music was about the same thing as it was in other dancehalls around the world: contact. The new form would actually re-marry American soul and R&B influences back into reggae, and met with a group eager for something of its own. This Is Lovers Rock collects some of the best blueprints from the 1970s and add classics from the ’80s and ’90s. Carroll Thompson, Jean Adebambo and Brown Sugar are just a few examples that carried enough feeling to reach the UK pop charts.