Mento: the first Jamaican pop

Mento blended African and European elements into Jamaica's first commercial popular music, carried by banjo, guitar and the rumba box.

Mento took shape through the 19th and early 20th centuries as enslaved and later free Jamaicans blended African rhythmic sensibility with British and Spanish folk melody, sung over acoustic guitar, banjo and the rhumba box - a large box-shaped mbira played sitting down, carrying the bass line the way a bass guitar would later. Lyrics leaned on humour, work, courtship and double meaning, tracking everyday rural and working-class life. It stayed mostly a live, dance-hall and street tradition until the early 1950s, when producers Stanley Motta and Ivan Chin began pressing mento performers onto 78 rpm discs - Jamaica's first commercially recorded popular music, and a direct ancestor of the guitar-and-bass feel that ska would later electrify and speed up.

Mento origins and instrumentation: Wikipedia; the Reggae Museum's mento history. Precise dating of "the first" mento recording is disputed among discographers - Motta's and Chin's early-1950s releases are the best-documented starting point, not a single confirmed first record.