Middle-of-the-road, cocktail music, Muzak, or cheesy pseudo-New Age music intended to entice customers at a supermarket or department store to shop.

god supposedly created us and everything in the universe.

The history of ska music is interesting as since its birth ska has continued to develop into many different styles. In forty years ska has enjoyed three waves of popularity around the world. This essay attempts to trace ska music's history, the roots, the birth, the styles and, hopefully will offer you some interesting facts.

EARLY JAMAICAN CULTURE
To fully understand the origins of ska and trace its unique musical elements we must understand some important parts of Jamaican history. The island of Jamaica was first visited by Europeans in 1494 by Columbus. The British won the right to colonize and began shipping slaves from the west coast of Africa to work on newly set up plantations. By 1807 there were over two million Africans in Jamaica working on English plantations in the most brutal systems of slavery in the world.

The slaves tried hard to hold on to their African philosophy and established their own system of beliefs and values in their slave communities. Some forms of African music, such as the Burru were allowed by the white masters who believed it would help the slaves to work faster. At times the slave musicians were also called upon to entertain the white masters. The type of entertainment provided by the slave musicians followed a carnival tradition and allowed the oppressed performers to dress and act like kings, queens, lords and ladies for the amusement of the white masters. In the 1960's this tradition was continued by performers who adopted royal t...

Jamaican musical style developed in the late 1950s, which took elements from traditional Jamaican folk music of mento and calypso and of American music, including jazz and particularly R&B. In fact, the earliest ska songs were basically "Jamaicanized" R&B songs. The inovation that gave ska it's trademark sound was placing the accent guitar and piano rhythms on the upbeats as opposed to the downbeats, as in R&B.

The jazz influence came primarily from the studio bands that often backed the artists who recorded for the various Jamaican studios during sessions. It is so because many members of these bands where jazz musicians themselves, often a product of the famed Alpha School of Music.

Ska is the precursor to rocksteady, reggae and the various offshoots to reggae. Ska was popular abroad, especially in England during the late 60s as a result of West Indian immigration to England, where it was the music of choice for the emerging skinhead subculture and is still a dominant feature of the so-called "trad skin" subculture today. Ska also had a revival in England in the late 70s/early 80s with the emergence of punk and a "third-wave revival" in the U.S. in the 90s, but by then the sound had changed much from the original sound that permiated Jamaica during those formative early years of ska music.