Roots of Reggae

I've been a reggae fan for some time now, tho lately I find I listen to more dub, which is arguably very much the same, though with more reverb and overdriven bass. This means you, Abyssinians and King Tubby.

Toots Hibbert (of and the Maytals fame) came up with the word reggae (actually "reggay") in the late 60s with this hit.

In its etymology, the words "rags, ragged clothing" and "a quarrel, a row" feature prominently, two terms which are associated with the music to this day. The revolutionary tone, a movement of the people, these are the fundamentals of this music.

There are others who claim the roots of "reggae" lie in the Jamaican patois word streggae, meaning "loose woman" became morphed into reggae. Apparently, Toots once said of a woman when she walked by "she look streggae, raggae." He and his friends put that to a beat that we now recognize as reggae, and the music has since been associated with the term.

Bob Marley once claimed that the word reggae derived from regis, latin for "to the king," but it would seem to me that this music, tho possibly directed at the king, was not intended to be consumed by the king, and so this seems unlikely. It's hard to argue with the king of reggae, but, well, I think I just did...

This kind of thing leads me to wonder about the roots of a lot of words. This is one the reasons I first got into linguistics, before I realized it was dominated by Minimalism, the Penn Treebank, and grammars of obscure languages spoken by a dwindling few. But, now I'm getting off topic.