In honour of Mother’s Day, Observer Online is saluting several women who played important roles in the reggae movement.

Louise “Miss Lou” Bennett Coverley

Considered in some quarters the first dub poet, Miss Lou championed the use of Jamaican dialect on radio and in schools. While humorous, her poems like Nuh Lickle Twang and Dry Foot Bwoy, accurately captured the social state of mind in pre-Independence Jamaica.