The mento is the first Jamaican popular music. He(it) appears to the end of the xixe century in the rural zones of the island. The mento is simply the music which the Jamaican farmers, after their day of labour, liked playing and listening to to amuse and forget one moment the hardness of their way of living. This term also describes the free dance which accompanies him(it) and which plunges its roots into the Ashanti rites, and the other West-African ethnic groups. Because of the fashion of the Calypso of the island of the Trinity, in the 1940s, from 1951 the first recordings of mento carry(wear) mostly the label more seller of "calypso". It is a confusion. This kind(genre) preceded the ska, the rocksteady, the Reggae, appeared in the post-war years under the influence of the popular musics of the United States (Rock and Rythm ' and Blues)

Of rural origin, the mento uses traditionally instruments as the Banjo, the guitar, the flute, the fife, the maracas, percussions, but also lamellophone low called the rumba cubicle(garage,dock) or thumb piano, the violin, and the saxophone of bamboo. He(it) exists in urban version, interpreted in cabarets and hotels of Jamaica, where he(it) knows a strong influence of the jazz (saxophone, trumpet, piano, etc.). The themes frequently approached by the mento are the critics of the social and political life, the working singings(songs), and the texts with a double meaning where the sexuality has a big importance. (Wikipedia source)
This compilation gathers the artists and the pieces most emblèmatiques of this style.