From folk practice to studio language

Jamaican popular music did not begin in a studio. Revival and Kumina ceremonies, Maroon ritual, quadrille sets, Jonkonnu masquerade and mento dance bands had already worked out the rhythms, the drums and the way of using Jamaican speech in public. When recording began in the 1950s, it did not invent a language so much as plug one in.

Before there was a record

It is easy to read Jamaican music history as beginning with a microphone, because that is where the documents begin. But by the time the first commercial recordings were cut in Kingston in the early 1950s, the island had spent three centuries working out how drums should be tuned, how a lead voice and a chorus should trade lines, and what a crowd was owed by whoever was performing in front of it. Recording gave those habits a new container. It did not supply them.

Several traditions ran alongside each other, each with its own drums and its own occasion. Kumina, concentrated in St Thomas and carried by Central African indentured labourers who arrived after emancipation, is played on the kbandu and the higher-pitched playing cyas, the lead drummer riding over a steady bass pulse. Revival, which grew out of the religious upheaval of 1860 and 1861, works through hymn, groaning and the rhythmic overbreathing called trumping. In the Maroon towns of Accompong and Moore Town, the abeng horn and the Kromanti drums carried a ceremonial repertoire older than any of it.

The country dance

Secular music had its own circuit. Quadrille, a European set dance taken up and reworked across the Caribbean, was played in Jamaica by small bands of fiddle, fife, banjo and drum, and it survives in parish groups still. At Christmas, Jonkonnu masquerade bands moved through the streets behind fife and rattling drum, in costumes whose characters had been handed down for generations. These were the occasions at which most Jamaicans encountered live music.

Mento drew all of it together into something portable. A mento band ran on banjo or guitar, hand drum, bamboo saxophone and the rhumba box — a large thumb piano the player sits on, plucking the bass line with both hands. Its songs were topical, comic and often frankly bawdy, and they carried the news of a district as much as its tunes. This was the music a Jamaican wedding or a country dance actually hired.

Mento was also the first Jamaican music to be pressed. Stanley Motta recorded it in his Kingston shop from the early 1950s for his MRS label, sending the masters abroad to be pressed and selling the results back home and to tourists. Lord Fly, Lord Flea and Count Lasher were the names on the labels. Because calypso was the Caribbean music the outside world had a word for, mento was frequently sold as calypso, and the confusion has never entirely cleared.

The studio did not invent a Jamaican musical language. It found one already in use and plugged it in.

Drums from the hill

The clearest single moment of transfer came in 1960. Count Ossie, born Oswald Williams, led a community of Rastafari drummers at Wareika Hill above east Kingston, playing the three-drum Nyabinghi pattern — bass, funde and the improvising repeater — that had grown out of the older Burru drumming of the city. When Prince Buster needed something nobody else had for a session with the Folkes Brothers, he brought Ossie's drummers into the studio, and "Oh Carolina" went out with Rastafari hand drums under a pop vocal.

It was a genuine breach. Rastafari was treated at the time as a public nuisance at best, and its music had no place on a commercial record. Ossie went on to form the Mystic Revelation of Rastafari with the saxophonist Cedric Brooks, whose Grounation, released in 1973, set drumming, chant and jazz horns across a triple album. Shaggy's 1993 version of "Oh Carolina" took the same song to number one in Britain, three decades after the drummers came down off the hill.

The language question

None of this could have moved onto record without a change in what Jamaican speech was allowed to be. Louise Bennett, known universally as Miss Lou, spent a career from the 1940s onward writing and performing poetry in Jamaican Patois and presenting it on radio and television, at a time when the language was widely treated as broken English to be corrected out of children. She made it a medium a public performance could be built in. Every deejay who ever chatted on a rhythm was working in ground she cleared.

Institutions followed. The Jamaica Festival, established around independence in 1962, built folk performance into a national calendar with competitions in music, dance and speech. The musicologist Olive Lewin collected field recordings across the island and founded the Jamaican Folk Singers in 1967 to perform the repertoire she had gathered. What had been district practice became something with an archive and a stage.

What carried over

The inheritance is audible rather than decorative. Revival phrasing runs through the singing of Toots Hibbert, who grew up in church and never left its attack behind. Nyabinghi drumming underpins the roots reggae of the 1970s wherever a record wants to sound like conviction rather than romance. The call-and-response of the ceremony ground survives in the way a deejay works a crowd, and the topical, joking, local address of a mento lyric survives in dancehall. When the studios opened, the music walked in already knowing what to do.