Word.ws English Dictionary

bluebeat

bluebeat noun: any of various styles of Jamaican music, popular in the United Kingdom in the 1960s, precursor of reggae.

Noun

bluebeat (uncountable)

  1. Any of various styles of Jamaican music, popular in the United Kingdom in the 1960s, precursor of reggae.
    • Reggae music came to the UK shores as bluebeat and later through names like ska and rocksteady.1971 November 13, Billboard, volume 83, number 46, page 34
    • Chris returned with a trunk full of bluebeat 45s that sold out in days. On his next trip he decided to learn more about the Jamaican music business.2010, Joe Boyd, White Bicycles: Making Music in the 1960s, page 180

Examples of bluebeat in a sentence

  • There we could all dance, or in my case tap my feet the night away to OUR music: ska, bluebeat and motown.2011, Ted Curtis, Robert Dellar, Leslie Esther, Mad Pride, page 38:
  • Bluebeat and ska from a boombox on the pavement.2013, Joseph O'Connor, Where Have You Been?, page 271:
  • West Indian youngsters, marooned in this cultural maelstrom and kicking their heels in inner-city estates, took refuge in their musical roots: ska, bluebeat and rocksteady.2019 February 16, Kim Willsher, “From Soho to Paris, how migrant music brought two capitals to life”, in The Guardian, →ISSN:

Forms of bluebeat

alternative formblue-beat
alternative formblue beat

Origin of bluebeat

From blue + beat, named after Blue Beat Records, a London record label that released Jamaican R&B and ska in the 1960s. The label was named after the blues genre.

Questions about bluebeat

What does bluebeat mean?
Bluebeat means any of various styles of Jamaican music, popular in the United Kingdom in the 1960s, precursor of reggae.
How do you use bluebeat in a sentence?
There we could all dance, or in my case tap my feet the night away to OUR music: ska, bluebeat and motown.
What part of speech is bluebeat?
Bluebeat is a noun.

Words near bluebeat in the dictionary

  1. bluebeard
  2. Bluebeardesque
  3. Bluebeardian
  4. Bluebeardism
  5. bluebeards
  6. bluebeat
  7. bluebell
  8. bluebell creeper
  9. bluebell creepers
  10. bluebell of Scotland
  11. bluebelled

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: bluebeat (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “bluebeat.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/bluebeat. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.