Jamaican Popular Music, from Mento to Dancehall Reggae

Despite its global popularity, reggae, and the myriad Jamaican popular music forms which led up to it creation, has long lacked a bibliographic resource that could assist its legion of fans, students and scholars. Until now. Based on 15 years of research Jamaican Popular Music offers nearly 3700 entries on the evolution of the island⿿s commercial music scene from the calypso-like mento of the late-1940s and ⿿50s to the roots reggae revolution of the 1970s and the...
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Despite its global popularity, reggae, and the myriad Jamaican popular music forms which led up to it creation, has long lacked a bibliographic resource that could assist its legion of fans, students and scholars. Until now. Based on 15 years of research Jamaican Popular Music offers nearly 3700 entries on the evolution of the island⿿s commercial music scene from the calypso-like mento of the late-1940s and ⿿50s to the roots reggae revolution of the 1970s and the dancehall boom of the 1980s and beyond. It also provides in-depth coverage of the music⿿s diffusion to more than 51 countries abroad along with a biographical section documenting the careers of some 800 individual artists, producers, dancers, filmmakers, and others. Sources range from fanzine interviews and newspaper reportage to scholarly theses and journal articles published in Jamaica, Australia, Asia, Europe, Africa, and North and South America. Much of this material is cited here for the first time based on the author⿿s analytic indexing of some 150 arts, music, humanities and social science journals. The result is a ground-breaking effort offering insights into all facets of the local, regional and transnational impact of Jamaican popular music.