Mento music is traditional Jamaican music in its finest form - original, authentic, folk-based, and spanning an era from the sugar plantation revelries through to Emancipation, onwards to Independence and the attendant celebrations of the 1960s.
As pointed out in Olive Senior's A-Z of Jamaican Heritage, mento music was a fixture at any festival during this period, until its popularity faded with the advent of recorded music and the 'sound systems', to be finally crowded out by other popular music forms such as the ska, rocksteady and reggae.
Nevertheless 'old-time' Jamaicans regard mento music with nostalgia, and the recent passing of one of the icons of that era, Theodore 'T' Miller, founder of the famous Lititz Mento Band from South St Elizabeth and Manchester, represents a great loss to Jamaica's cultural heritage.
T-Miller, as he was known, died on June 10 at age 88, after giving more than 70 years to the enshrinement of Jamaica's best known type of folk music.
The tributes and eulogies at his funeral at Downs, Manchester, on Saturday, June 27, did him great honour, coming from his friends and community but, as is the case with many of our unsung heroes, there was an absence of the national testimonial that his phenomenal cultural contribution deserves.
His passing was overshadowed by the outpouring of accolades that marked Michael Jackson's unfortunate passing and, in paying homage to the international superstar, we regretfully ignored the legacy of our own 'son of the soil'.
T-Miller said he started playing by lamplight for country dances in the 1940s when the quadrille and the mento were the craze and patrons selected music by 'penny set', one penny for an item, years before the juke box held sway.
His five-piece band, using the traditional rumba box, grater, shaker, banjo and his home-styled violin, formed the recognisable sound of the '50s in rural Jamaica.
Countless feet shuffled and a thousand hips swayed as T-Miller played his beloved violin like no other fiddler around the countryside, with several generations growing up with this humble small farmer and his sweet mento music.
Most famous citizen
Mountainside villagers recall that their most famous citizen and late Prime Minister Donald Sangster never missed a beat as he toured South St Elizabeth party scenes in his younger days, T-Miller in tow and 'Lawyer Sangster' displaying his mastery of all the dance steps that were the rage at the time.
The band was a feature item in the 1955 Tercentenary Celebrations (Jamaica's recognition of 300 years of British rule). It was also a headliner at the 1962 Independence fair sponsored by Kaiser Bauxite at Pepper, St Elizabeth, which drew 25,000 persons.
It was in the 1950s when the Lititz Mento Band, still to be regarded as one of the cultural treasures of Jamaica, caught Kaiser's attention, and they were sponsored repeatedly into concerts and competitions, capturing gold medals at each performance, and sent abroad by Kaiser and the government as cultural ambassadors on several occasions.
The group performed across the globe and sparked the interest of many international organisations including the British Broadcasting Corporation and the Annual Banjo Players Convention in Nashville, Tennessee, where T-Miller performed famously as the only violinist among banjo players from all over the world.
T-Miller and his hometown Lititz are intertwined in Jamaica's history - Lititz as the site of Jamaica's first elementary school, founded by the Moravians in 1826, and Miller as the humble, self-effacing folk legend who kept alive the rhythms of the quadrille, kumina, gombay, dinki-mini and bruckins dances for different generations.
Like other mento bands more prominent on the north coast hotel strips, he also preserved for us some of the naughty lyrics that played across moonlit booths and open-air spaces before radio play became popular - Iron Bar, Penny Reel, the irreverent Night Food and the haunting Brown Skin Gal.
He was recognised by the government and the Institute of Jamaica with badges of distinction, and the Jamaica Cultural Development Commission also honoured him as an outstanding son of St Elizabeth, but he was largely unknown to the present generation.
Michael Jackson and himself were two worlds apart but, hopefully, like Jackson, T-Miller's name, and his music, will live on.