Jamaica’s original rural folk music, known as mento, is the grandfather of reggae music and had significant influences about the formation of that genre. Jamaica music was inspired by African and European music as well as by American jazz and featured acoustic guitars, banjos, bamboo saxes, hand drums and marimbula (large thumb pianos) also known as rhumba boxes, which had been large enough to sit on and play. There had been also a variety of hand percussion instruments like maracas. Mento’s vocals experienced a distinctly African sound and the lyrics were almost always humorous and happy. Everywhere individuals gathered you could discover a mento band and there were many mento and calypso competitions all through the island. Mento also gave birth to Jamaica’s recording business within the 1950s when it first became available on 78 RPM records. Mento is still close to today.
Before Globe War II, calypso from Trinidad and Tobago had made its way into Jamaica’s music and, even though very various, the two had been frequently baffled. Jamaica’s personal calypso artists performed alongside its mento artists throughout the island, for locals and tourists alike. A calypso craze swept the U.S. and U.K. within the late 1950s as Harry Belafonte came onto the scene. Many of his songs had been actually mento but they were more frequently described as calypso.
After the war, transistor radios and jukeboxes had become extensively accessible and Jamaicans were in a position to hear music from the southern U.S., particularly jazz and rhythm and blues from some of the greats like Fats Domino and Jelly Roll Morton, and data flooded into the island.
And then, in the early 1960s, came American R&B. With a faster and far more danceable tempo, the genre caught on quickly in Jamaica. Trying to copy this sound with local artists, Jamaicans added their personal unique twists, blending in components of their Caribbean heritage, fusing it with mento and calypso and jazz, to produce a distinctive genre heavily driven by drums and bass and accented with rhythms about the off-beat, or the “upstroke”. This solely Jamaican style dominated the Jamaican music landscape at the time and was known as … ska.
Ska
Coinciding with the joyful mood within the air when Jamaica won its independence from the U.K. in 1962, ska had a type of 12-bar rhythm and blues framework; the guitar accented the second and fourth beats in the bar, basically flipping the R&B shuffle beat, and gave rise to this new sound.
Because Jamaica didn’t ratify the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works until 1994, Jamaican musicians frequently created instrumental ska versions of music by popular American and British artists; copyright infringement was not an issue! The Skatalites re-made Motown hits, surf music and even the Beatles in their own style. The Wailers’ very first single Simmer Down was a ska smash in Jamaica in late 1963/early 1964 but they also covered And I Love Her by the Beatles and Like a Rolling Stone by Bob Dylan.
Even though the sound system concept had taken root in Jamaica in the mid 1950s, ska led to its explosion in popularity and it became a major, uniquely Jamaican, business that continues to thrive today. Enterprising DJs with U.S. sources for the latest records would load up pickup trucks with a generator, turntables, and huge speakers, and drive around the island blaring out the latest hits. Essentially these sound systems had been like loud mobile discos! DJs charged admission and sold food and alcohol, enabling them to profit in Jamaican’s unstable economy. Thousands would sometimes assemble and sound systems started to be huge business, as well as Jamaica dancehall music. Amongst fierce competition, Clement “Coxsone” Dodd and Duke Reid surfaced as two of the star DJs of the day. Reliant on a steady source of new music, these two superstars began to produce their personal data, ultimately becoming Studio One (Dodd) and Treasure Isle (Reid).
Other important ska producers were Prince Buster, whose Blue Beat label records inspired numerous Jamaican ska (and later reggae) artists, and Edward Seaga, who owned and operated the West Indies Records Limited (WIRL) in the 1960s but went on to turn out to be Prime Minister of Jamaica and leader with the Jamaican Labour Party within the 1980s.
As Jamaicans emigrated in big numbers to the U.K., the sound system culture followed and became firmly entrenched there. Without the efforts of a white Anglo-Jamaican named Chris Blackwell, the rest of the world might not have come to know this Jamaican brand of music. Blackwell, a record distributor, moved his label to the U.K. in 1962 and began releasing data there on various labels, including the Island label. His early artists included the Skatalites, Jimmy Cliff and Bob Marley. Blackwell’s international breakthrough came in 1964 when his artist Millie Small hit the U.S. airwaves with My Boy Lollipop.
Back in Jamaica, as American R&B and soul music became slower and smoother within the mid-1960s, ska changed its sound and evolved into… rocksteady.
Rocksteady
Songs that described dances had been very popular now within the U.S. and U.K, too as Jamaica. Within the U.S., we experienced The Twist, The Locomotion, The Hanky Panky and also the Mashed Potato. One popular dance-song in Jamaica was The Rock Steady by Alton Ellis. The name for this entire genre may have been based on that song title.
The only noteworthy difference between ska and rocksteady was the tempo. Both styles had the famous Jamaican rhythm guitar complemented by drums, bass, horns, vocals and a groove that kept you on your feet moving, but the drum and bass are played at a slower, a lot more relaxed, pace and also the rhythm is a lot more syncopated.
Rocksteady arose at a time when Jamaica’s poverty-stricken youths experienced become disillusioned about their futures after Jamaica gained independence from Britain. Turning into delinquents, these rowdy youths became known as “rude boys”. Rocksteady’s themes mainly dealt with love and the rude boy culture, and had catchy dance moves which were far more energetic than the earlier ska dance moves. Many bass lines originally created for rocksteady songs continue to be used in today’s Jamaican music.
As a musical style, rocksteady was short-lived, and existed for only about two years. A few of the more well-known rocksteady artists had been Alton Ellis, Justin Hinds and the Dominos, Derrick Morgan, The Gaylads, The Kingstonians, Delroy Wilson, Bob Andy, Ken Boothe, The Maytals and the Paragons.
Carrying on to evolve, Jamaica’s musical tempo slowed down, bass patterns became a lot more complex, and also the piano gave way to the electric organ, giving birth to… reggae, which eventually became the most popular music genre in the world. It is now easy to get Jamaica music download these days.