Performance in context...Parte II...

The folk music introduced earlieris broad, but does not include within it the music of religion, as the former are separate and apart from the sacred music (here sacred meaning music for distinctly religious purposes). As a people, Jamaicans are in my estimation, inherently spiritual. A theory I would posit for this has its roots in the enslavement system. Slaves, having been imported, were then instructed in the master’s religion; their animistic, ancestral venerating religions of before being vilified and outlawed, along with all other means of cultural retention. An effective way to re-socialise someone is stripping away those elements which had facilitated the development or formation of the identity they had assumed under their previous value system. While an effective method, this system did not make room for the instances of resistance through continued covert practice, or, and which more often took place, the process of cultural assimilations and innovations, where there would be an amalgamation of elements of both into a new form which had elements of both but was in actuality neither (this however is the ideal, and there is an informal gradient on which the religious practice is measured to determine which it leans to most in terms of its major tenets and practices). As would follow, these new practices developed their own musical expression and style, which gave rise to their own music which would conform to their ideals and worship practices, within which are songs of assembly (if we were to use the Revivalism/Zionist model for example) such as “there is a meeting here tonight”, songs of praise and adoration, songs of supplication “plant di letta pon di seal” in which one asks that the message intended for you is made clear through the seal or table/altar, of rapture and judgement, and songs of gratitude and dispersal.