thumb|right|350px|Mento rhythm;
Mento is a style of Jamaican folk music that predates and has greatly influenced ska and reggae music. The conflation of both genres by the 1950s, due to commercial practices during the international rise of some famous Jamaican mento artists, who helped to pioneer calypso, contributed to the confusion. Enslaved musicians were occasionally required to play music singing European folk songs, which had a significant influence on the development of mento. Some of Jamaica's oldest cultural traditions and dance forms including jonkunnu, quadrille, burru and Maypole, which emerged during slavery and post-emancipation, feature mento music. By the late 1800s and early 1900s, mento had become a clearly recognizable Jamaican folk style and had consolidated as a genre,
Noted ethnomusicologist, Dr. Daniel T. Neely, described mento as:
Conflation with Trinidadian calypso
The Jamaican mento style has a long history of conflation with Trinidadian calypso.
Calypso was introduced to the North American market earlier than other Caribbean styles, which led to the latter being treated as mere sub-genres.
Due in part to Belafonte's popularity, mento became widely conflated with calypso in the 1950s. In a 1957 interview for Calypso Star magazine, Lord Flea said:
<blockquote>In Jamaica, we call our music 'mento' until very recently. Today, 'calypso' is beginning to be used for all kinds of West Indian music. This is because it's become so commercialized there. Some people like to think of West Indians as carefree natives who work and sing and play and laugh their lives away. But this isn't so. Most of the people there are hard working folks, and many of them are smart business men. If the tourists want 'calypso', that's what we sell them.</blockquote>
This was the golden age of mento, as records pressed by Stanley Motta, Ivan Chin, Ken Khouri and others brought the music to a new audience. It gained significant popularity in the 1940s and 1950s, with mento performances becoming a common aspect of dances, parties and other cultural events in Jamaica, This style of music was revived in popularity by the Jolly Boys in the late 1980s and early 1990s, with the release of four recordings on First Warning Records/Rykodisc and a tour that included the United States.