Ziggy Marley is now a four time Grammy™ award winner, this time for his album Love Is My Religion. His brother Damian won the Reggae Grammy last year for the top-class album Welcome to Jamrock.
The Grammys included a Best Reggae Album category for the first time in 1984, and the inaugural award was won by Black Uhuru for their recording Anthem. A few years ago the category seemed to be on its dying bed, suffering from a lack of submissions, but there was an upswing in 2003 (that was, I think, the year Sean Paul won for Dutty Rock), and it seems that its been going strong since. So strong in fact that there have been proposals to split the category into two: one for traditional roots reggae and one for dancehall. (You can read about how experts see the differences between the two genres; the Chair of the Reggae Grammy Committee doesn’t seem to be a big fan of dancehall music.) The latest request for the split was turned down (with no reasons given for the refusal), but the Committee plans to try again in the next Grammy year.
For what it’s worth, which is next to nothing, I support the idea of a split, but I don’t like the idea of labelling the new categories “reggae” and “dancehall”. Dancehall is, in my opinion, a subset of the reggae genre. I’d prefer something like “roots reggae”/”traditional reggae” and “dancehall reggae”. A comparable distinction has been made in the R&B Grammy category, where you have awards for R&B, Traditional R&B and Contemporary R&B, but they are all clearly considered to be R&B (there’s also an award for Urban/Alternative music, which is also a sub-genre of R&B, although I’m not quite sure what “urban/alternative” means in that context—or any context, really. I sometimes wonder if it means “music by black people that doesn’t really sound how we expect music by black people to sound.” But I digress.). Also, it hasn’t been that long since the threat to do away with the category because there weren’t enough entrants; I think it might be prudent to give it a few more years, so that there is greater confidence that the minimum required number of submissions for each of the two proposed categories could be sustained after a split. Apart from those reservations, I’m all for the idea of two different categories.
Wikipedia has a list of all the past winners in the reggae category. Reggae artists have been awarded in other categories as well: Lady Saw and Bounty Killer have both won, for collaborations with the group No Doubt, awards in the category of “Best Pop Performance By A Duo Or Group With Vocal” and Damian Marley was the winner in the Urban/Alternative category in 2006.