This dissertation explores mento, a genre of Jamaican social dance music, and focuses on the ways ideas about Jamaican national identity have complicated its performance and history and yielded competing notions about what it is and how it should sound. In this study, I examine mento's history and development, focusing in particular on the relationship of three themes: folkness, social development and tourism. These themes are linked by the idea of cultural nationalism, an idea that has motivated and influenced mento's performance in complex and sometimes contradictory ways since the nineteenth century. Often referred to as "Jamaica's original music," I argue that mento's symbolic value in popular culture has become fragmented and its ideological and musical meanings increasingly open to re-articulation.

To show how these ideas developed and affect mento today, I investigate archival sources, paying special attention to the ways culture-based institutions—including the Welfare & Development Ministry, the Festival Office, the Jamaica Tourist Board and the local recording industry—have mobilized and presented mento music opportunistically for the purposes of nation building. I temper my archival work with careful ethnographic research among contemporary musicians to show how historical representations differ from the lived experience of those who make the music. I conclude that claims about mento's historical authenticity and "originality" are often products of modern nation building programs, and are mired in an antiquated ideological and musicological approach that fails to account for how the music and its practitioners have adapted and changed over time. A work of historical ethnomusicology, this research offers a critical reassessment of the narratives commonly found in traditional and popular music studies in the Caribbean and suggests a new perspective on the study of early Jamaican musical history.