Essay On Jamaican Music

Jamaica is an island country in the Caribbean Sea. It is about 10,990 square kilometers and is the fourth largest island country in the Caribbean. Jamaica has 2.73 million people as of 2015 living there. The island 's name, Jamaica, came from the Arawak word Xaymaca, which means "land of wood and water" or "land of springs". Even though the official language is English, most Jamaicans speak an English-based dialect which is known as patois.

Jamaican music has been around for a very long time. The style of music moved from mento, to ska, to rocksteady, to reggae and dancehall music. Mento is an “old time” story telling in song and music. It combines African and Latin rhythm, with Anglo Folksong. Now it is used to entertain visitors and giving them a taste of what Jamaican music was like in the past. If you listen to it, you will feel the spirit of the “old” days. The instruments are also very simple, a gourd

Rocksteady came about in Jamaica in the late 1960s. Though the rocksteady era only lasted for a couple of years, it had a major influence on reggae music, which became the most popular music genre in Jamaica when rocksteady died out. Rocksteady is a derivative of ska music, so it has roots in both traditional Jamaican mento as well as American R&B and jazz. Like ska, rocksteady is music that was popular for street dancing. However, unlike the wild ska dancing, rocksteady provides a slower, mellower beat, allowing for more relaxed dancing. Rocksteady bands, such as Justin Hinds and the Dominoes, frequently performed without a horn section and with a strong electric bass line, paving the way for many reggae bands that did the same. Rocksteady essentially went away by the end of the 1960s, but it didn 't really die out, it evolved into what we now know as reggae. Many bands that we think of as ska bands or reggae bands released at least one rocksteady record during that era, and much modern ska and reggae-influenced bands use the rocksteady sound on their