The mento and folk standard that begins "carry me ackee go a Linstead Market". It is a market song about not selling — the singer's ackee goes untouched and the money does not come — and its plain account of hard trade is part of why it has stayed in the repertoire, recorded by everyone from folk collectors to Harry Belafonte.

Mento vocalist who was lead singer of Chin's Calypso Sextet out of Chin's Radio Service on Church Street, Kingston; his "Night Food" (written by Everald Williams) was among the fastest-selling Jamaican records of the early 1950s.

Astley Clerk published The Music and Musical Instruments of Jamaica in 1913, the first Jamaican-authored survey of the island's instruments and their Taino, African and European origins. It remains a standard citation in the field.

The banjo is the instrument that gives mento its bite. Played rhythmically rather than picked in the American bluegrass manner, it sits with the guitar, hand drum, rhumba box and often a bamboo saxophone in the standard mento line-up — the sound Jamaican popular music came from before ska turned towards American radio.

Mento band formed in 1967 in May Pen, Clarendon, and long counted among Jamaica's finest. Stanley Beckford chose the band to back his two albums of 2002, which took them to an international audience, and their own album We Will Wait followed in 2011 with guest appearances by Toots Hibbert, Bunny Wailer and the ska era singer Stranger Cole.

One of the mento groups recording in Kingston in the middle 1950s, in the first real wave of Jamaican commercial recording. The sides were made by Ivan Chin and sold largely through his own Chin's Radio shop, and the singer on many of them is Alerth Bedasse. The records were sold partly to tourists as calypso, which is why so much early mento is labelled that way, but the playing is mento, and this is roughly where the Jamaican record industry starts.

One of the mento singers who recorded through the 1950s, in the wave of Jamaican records made just before ska. His songs work the way mento does — topical, funny and pointed about hard circumstances — and belong to the period when Jamaica was recording its own music commercially for the first time.

Count Owen was a baritone mento singer and bandleader whose Federal Studio sessions for Ken Khouri, collected as Calypsos Down Jamaica Way, document how mento was packaged and marketed to tourists as calypso.

Before his later career in the record business and in politics, Edward Seaga carried out field recording in Jamaica between roughly 1953 and 1956, producing Folk Music of Jamaica for Folkways in 1956 — the first commercial anthology of Jamaican folk and religious music, covering Pukkumina, Kumina and Zion — and the study Revival Cults in Jamaica. Separately from his folklore fieldwork, Seaga held the Jamaican import and distribution franchise for Columbia Records in the pre-independence years, alongside Ken Khouri's RCA franchise and Byron Lee's Atlantic franchise, giving him direct commercial control over American-record airplay before Jamaican-made records could compete for radio time. He personally produced Byron Lee's first record, "Dumplin's", in 1959 and encouraged Lee to take up ska, and later, as head of Jamaica's Social Welfare and Economic Development portfolio, organised the country's ska delegation to the 1964 New York World's Fair.

Everard Williams wrote much of the repertoire recorded by Chin's Calypso Sextet in the 1950s, including "Night Food", and played maracas on the sessions. He is one of the era's least credited figures: a working lyricist behind a catalogue usually filed under the performers' names.