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Footnotes
1. Melodisc started operating in 1949. It was founded by the Austrian entrepreneur Emil Shalit, based in New York at the time, who had a British partner named Jack Chilkes. Melodisc became the largest independent record label in the UK, the main outlet for Caribbean and African music in this country. Melodisc records were exported in large numbers to West Africa, where Caribbean music gained immense popularity. The company can be considered to be the first independent UK label featuring music from different parts of the world like India, the Caribbean and Western Africa, strongly anticipating developments in the music industry and the global exchange of music to come.
2. Richard Noblett, Notes to ”London is the Place for Me - Trinidadian Calypso in London1950-1956” (LP/CD) London: Honest Jons Records, 2002.
3. Noblett, 2002.
4. I‘m grateful to John Cowley and Richard Noblett for plenty discographic information over the years.
5. One telling example is Kitcheners Calypso ”Sweet Jamaica” which became an even more popular tune in the Mento-Version by the Jamaican Mento singer Lord Lebby (Kalypso RL 3) after it circulated around Jamaica on record.
6. Paul Gilroy, Against Race, 2001, 184. The transformation of ”freedom” as an issue in Black Atlantic culture which Gilroy suggests is that from a ”pursuit of freeedom”, a ”yearning for freedom” into ”a different private mode, signalled by the growing centrality of what might be called a ”racialized bodypolitics” (ibid.).
7. One telling example for this can be the song ”Black Man Redemption” by the Senegalese group Postive Black Soul on their (cassette) release Revolution 2000 (Palm Tree, 2000). Of course, it would be very convenient to argue that they have just not reached the level of self-indulgence that probably leads into what Gilroy terms the ”racialized bodypolitics”. But, is there only one possible route into the 21st century? One that gives in to the certainties of what could be called capitalist/mass-media evolutionism and its obvious cultural effects?
8. ”Singing Ghana’s Praises”, West African Review No. 352, January 1957, 24.
9. Dave Chapple, Liner Notes to Laurel Aitken - The Pioneer of Jamaican Music, Audio CD, Reggae Retro (UK) 2000.
10. In a book soon to be published (that is a revised version of my PhD-thesis) I am attempting to put the Mento tradition in Jamaica into a social and cultural context. I am also trying to emphasise the importance of recorded Mento in the 1950s and its surrounding popular culture as a vital departure point in the evolution of Jamaican popular music in the following decades.
11. As far as the African element in Rasta music is concerned, one has to acknowledge that their musical inspiration can be traced back to the older Kumina and Buru traditions which were blended into a musical style which later became known as nyabingi drumming.
12. The first Jamaican attempt to read the movement differently was made by Augier et al. Report on the Rastafari Movement in Kingston Jamaica (Kingston: ISER, 1960). This report was requested by ”some prominent members of the Ras Tafari brethren”, the foreword informs. Cf. Sheila Kitzinger’s article “The Rastafarian Brethren In Jamaica” (1963) for a telling assessment of the social role of Rastafarians in the 1950s and 1960s. For a recollection of musical life in the Rasta Camps cf. Douglas Mack: From Babylon to Rastafari - Origin and History of the Rastafarian movement, 1999. For a reading of Kumina as a major source of Rastafarian music, cf. Ken Bilby, 1995.
13. Personal Conversation with Laurel Aitken, 10. 8. 2002, Mainz/Germany.
14. Roger Mais, ”Now We Know”, Public Opinion, 11.7.1944. I leave open for discussion the role of the ”Mother Country” in the feeling Aitken seems to hint at in his line ”black and white in Jamaica we don’t care a tick about that”.
Institut für Ethnologie und Afrikastudien - Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz