Jamaican Music

Jamaican music is the umbrella for the island's successive popular traditions: mento, the calypso-like folk dance music of the 1950s; ska, born when Kingston sound-system operators fused rhythm and blues with mento and jazz; its slowed descendants rocksteady and reggae; and the dub, dancehall and ragga revolutions that followed. Built by a small island's outsized cast of producers, engineers and singers, from *Prince Buster* and *Lee "Scratch" Perry* to *Bob Marley and the Wailers*, it created the sound system, the remix and the deejay as global forms and remains the most influential popular music ever made by a nation of three million.