Words by Jesse Serwer

Amy Winehouse, who died Saturday at age 27, left as her musical legacy a distinctively modern take on the timeless sound of vintage soul music. Lesser known is that the troubled singer was as enamored with Caribbean music as she was with R&B. In fact, her desire to take her followup to Back to Black in a more reggae-leaning direction may have almost as much to do with said album’s failure to materialize as did her well documented drug addiction. Seemingly on the road to recovery, the singer (who had previously indicated plans to record with her friend, Damian Marley) is said to have emerged from several months in St. Lucia in 2009 with a set of dark, heavily reggae-flavored tunes. Ironically, Island Records, the label responsible for turning reggae into a global phenomenon in the 1970s, apparently rejected this material on the grounds that it departed too drastically from the successful Back to Black formula.