Jamaica’s Theodore ‘T’ Miller, founder of the famous Lititz Mento Band from South St Elizabeth and Manchester, died on June 10 at the age of 88, after a career lasting more than 70 years. His loss, as the Gleaner recently reported, “represents a great loss to Jamaica’s cultural heritage.”
Mento is a style of Jamaican folk music that draws heavily on musical traditions brought to the island by African slaves. Olive Senior, in her A-Za of Jamaican Heritage, describes it as a form whose popularity faded with the advent of recorded music and new forms like ska, rocksteady and reggae, but which had represented Jamaican folk music in its most authentic, folk-based form. Played with acoustic instruments—guitar, banjo, hand drums, rhumba boxes, and fiddles—it featured lyrics that dealt with everyday problems in a lighthearted, humorous way. T Miller’s career was associated with the golden age of mento, which spanned the 1940’ and 50s.
Lance Neita, writing for the Gleaner, deplored the “absence of the national testimonial that his phenomenal cultural contribution deserved” at his death. Here are some excerpts from his article, which can be accessed through the link below:
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.
An early film of T Miller and his band can be seen here:
For more, see Lance Neita’s article at http://www.jamaica-gleaner.com/gleaner/20090714/ent/ent1.html
