The notes that follow are derived largely from original research by Michael Garnice from his site
mentomusic.com who in turn includes data drawn from a number of researchers including Dan Neely. I am grateful to them for making their work available. Transcriptions of some lyrics, much more biographical data, and many photos are available on Garnice's site.
Originating in the 19th century from the intersection of West African and European (notably the quadrille dance) performance styles, the first written evidence of the rural Jamaican folk music called mento occurred in the 1920s from pamphlets of printed lyrics and from discs made in New York City by Trinidadian and Jamaican jazz performers including Sam Manning and Lionel Belasco both of whom drew from mento sources. As Calypso became popular across the Caribbean, North America, Europe, and Africa during the 1930s-40s, mento performers cross-pollinated with or sometimes represented themselves as calypsonians to draw wider audiences. But their Jamaican rhythms just as often remained distinct, and their instrumentation - often including bamboo saxophone-like reed instruments, a rumba box (something like a large mbira, a plucked-tongue idiophone to give it its organological designation, which played the bass parts), fife, and banjo - belied its specifically rural Jamaican origins.
During the second half of the 20th century, Jamaica produced more disc recordings per capita than any other place on Earth, due largely to the rise of the “sound system” culture of playing highly amplified recorded music at dance parties in the mid-60s. But recording on the island started relatively late. It was only in 1951 that the Sephardic Jewish retailer and prominent member of the community Stanley Motta (b. Oct. 5, 1915; d. March 22, 1993) began recording, according to his son Brian in the notes to the CD Take Me to Jamaica (Pressure Sounds, 2006) in a 14x15 foot square back room of a woodwork factory at 93 Hanover St., near his store. Performers, engineers, and equipment were all in the same room using a single ribbon microphone. The resulting acetate discs were shipped to England to be mastered and manufactured by Decca Records as 78rpm discs. Motta’s label released dozens of discs until about 1957 and licensed many of them for release in the U.K. for the immigrant community there and other parts of the Empire for the Jamaican diaspora. Among the first Motta recordings were those by Lord Fly (b. Rupert “Pertie” Linley Lyon in Lucea, Jamaica 1905; d. June 28, 1967), an urban jazz performer whose success laid the groundwork for everything that followed him.
Other retailers including the Lebanese/Cuban-Jamaican Ken Khouri (b. St. Mary Parish 1917; d. Kingston Sept. 20, 2003), Chinese-Jamaican Ivan Chin (b. ca. 1924; d June 27, 2014), and Deonarine “Dada” Tewari followed suit in the mid-50s, cutting, manufacturing, and distributing discs. Chin’s label made its name with a series of recordings begun in 1955 by a group named for the label and centered around singer and composer Alerth Bedasse (b. 1928; d. Kingston 2007)and lyricist Harold Everard Franklyn Williams who played maracas and a group that featured bamboo sax, banjo, acoustic guitar, and rumba box. Michael Garnice has described Williams as “Jamaica’s first great lyricist,” whose story-telling and thematic material laid the groundwork for much of what Jamaican music became in subsequent decades. Williams was a schoolteacher who, after having lived in Cuba in the 1930s, performed with seminal Jamaican performers in the 1940s, including the street singers Slim and Sam. By 1949, he connected with Bedasse with whom he performed on the street. After years of struggle, they had a hit with “Night Food,” a song about cunnilingus, and its sequel “Night Food Recipe.” When those songs were the subject of opprobrium in Parliament from the Minister of Trade and Industry Willis O. Isaacs, Williams defended his lyrics, writing, “I am very, very sorry to have to be such a bad fellow, to drag the Minister’s children through the mud with my songs, but I am going to do better. […] But even now, I am wondering what there is in ’Night Food Recipe’ to spoil an innocent child? Anyway, I must be ignorant, and I bow to superior intelligence.” In all, Chin released 84 songs, many of them exceptionally bass-heavy for the time (foreshadowing later developments in Jamaican recordings), from 1955-57 including some risque songs as well as folk songs and, like much Trinidadian calypso material, social and political commentary.
The descendants of Africans in the Americas have provided incalculable artistic and cultural benefits to the others with whom they've lived. Foremost among them is the high value placed on truth-telling in and of itself. To say something clearly and out loud - to factually declaim and to do it skillfully in relation to its rhythmic counterpart and about one's personal and often very private experience - is in and of itself beautiful. It is often taken for granted now, but it is significantly an African sensibility that has given us this foundational aesthetic value and transformed American music for the better.
The tourist trade was a significant source of work for many Jamaican musicians in the middle of the 20th century. Hotels employed mento bands including that of Lord Composer. The only discs issued on the Maracas label was by Lord Powers' band appears to be an overt advertisement for a brand of rum, suggesting that it was funded by liquor company (not so different from the brief discography of the Nugrape Twins who recorded in Georgia in 1927).
Parallel to the first mento recordings in Jamaica, a series of calypso recordings of Jamaican folk songs were made in the U.K. by the American dancer/choreographer/singer Marie Bryant (b. Meridian, MI 1919; d. Los Angeles, CA 1978). Bryant had sung with Lionel Hampton and Duke Ellington's bands and appeared in the '40s as a dancer in a half-dozen movies before working with Katherine Dunham and teaching a who's-who of Hollywood: Gene Kelley, Betty Grable, Debbie Reynolds, Ava Gardner, etc. While performing in the show High Spirits in London in 1952-54, she recorded her calypso material including the sexually specific "Noisy Spring" and "Tomato" as well as the jokingly incestuous "Little Boy" which was issued as the second disc on Khouri's Kalypso label (immediately after "Night Food") and later entered the Jamaican repertoire (often titled "Mommy Out the Light"). The only other women to record mento in the '50s were Louise Lamb of Kingston, who recorded four sides for Motta's label, and Miss Lou (Louise Bennett, b. Kingston 1919; d. Toronto 2006). A cultural icon with a long and celebrated career, Miss Lou made her first 10" LP, Jamaican Folks Songs, for Moses Asch's New York-based label Folkways, released in 1954. Several of the songs she recorded (including one that would later come to be known as "Day-O" - which was also released around the same time as a medley with "Linstead Market" on a disc released by Khouri by a group called The Wigglers) that appeared three years later on the LP that became the game-changer for global recognition of Caribbean music generally.
With the 1957 release of the third LP Calypso by Harry Belafonte, speculation ran wild throughout the press of the English-speaking world: Would Calypso replace the rock n roll fad? But parallel to Jamaica’s independence and the introduction of American rhythm and blues records to Jamaica during the period 1958-62, mento gave way to a new style that quickly toughened, urbanized, and electrified Jamaican music, at home and abroad among the diaspora in the U.K. and Canada, for a new generation, initially released on the U.K. Blue Beat subsidiary of Melotone which had released some of the mento discs. By the early '60s, the new sound was called ska. For young and independent-minded Jamaicans straw hats and banjos were quickly replaced by stingy brims and electric guitars. Some lyrical content, rhythms, and a few performers, notably Lord Tanamo (b. Kingston Oct. 2, 1934; d. April 12, 2016) who became the first singer for the Skatalites, made the crossover to the new music that became reggae, but much of mento became obsolete among Jamaicans. Lyrics and themes from mento songs turned up in records by Bob Marley and Toots and the Maytals.
