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.

One of the mento groups that recorded for Stanley Motta in Kingston in the early 1950s, in the first real wave of Jamaican commercial recording. 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.

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.

The cane or bamboo fife that carries the melody in Jonkonnu and other Jamaican folk music, over the rattling drum and bass drum. It belongs to a tradition that predates recorded Jamaican music entirely, and its phrasing survives in mento and in the melodic instincts of what came after.