Dem Gud Ole Bwoys & Gyals...
Why not...Johnny Cash, maestro of a deep country songbook, loved Jamaica, had a home at Cinnamon Hill Great House (near Rose Hall) and supported local causes...suppose the influences flow both ways.

Many people don't know about Johnny Cash's long association with Jamaica. The country music star was a longtime Jamaica resident, at least for part of the year. His home was Cinnamon Hill, an historic greathouse located next door to the famous Rose Hall. Cinnamon Hill had been the birthplace of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's father, Edward Moulton Barrett. The Barretts later went on to own Greenwood Great House, also nearby.

Johnny--like many Jamaica visitors--seemed to have a real fascination with Rose Hall, which is reported to be haunted not only by the woman known as the "White Witch of Rose Hall" but by the lovers, husbands, and slaves she allegedly murdered in the plantation house. Cash went on to write a song called the "Ballad of Annie Palmer" in the early 70s. Tours at Rose Hall end out by Annie Palmer's grave where the guides sing the song with its haunting refrain:

Where's your husband Annie where's number two and three
Are they sleeping neath the palms beside the Caribbean Sea
At night I hear you ridin' and I hear your lovers call
And still can feel your presence round the great house at Rose Hall.
(from TakeMeToJamaica.com)

www.youtube.com/watch?v=bxUMHfupIGg&feature=related

Beres Hammond-He Stopped Loving Her Today
www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5FhrwYxbWA&feature=related

Etana-Crazy
www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-7ytSrkTeI&feature=related

Reggae Loves Country: A 50-Year Romance

Jamaica's passion for country music began with the advent of the first commercial radio station on the island, in 1950.
Jamaican writer Colin Channer explains that songs by artists like Skeeter Davis and Patsy Cline were on the playlist.

"When I was growing up in Jamaica there were only two radio stations, and we grew up thinking of music as being either local or foreign," he says. "The different genres of foreign music didn't matter that much — it was simply music that was not from there. So we didn't grow up with that segmented understanding of what music was, or what kind of music you were allowed to listen to, in the way that people in the U.S. did."

Country's popularity was boosted by the birth, around the same time, of cinema in Jamaica. Westerns were a big draw. "A lot of Westerns are essentially morality plays," Channer says. "And if you look at the way the church is so important in Jamaica, you can see how the way in which stories with moral themes, stories of revenge, stories of comeuppance would be popular there."

Westerns and country tunes also appealed to Jamaica's love of the outlaw — the so-called "badman" figure famously played by Jimmy Cliff in the 1973 film The Harder They Come. Years later, dancehall deejays Josey Wales and Clint Eastwood took their names from a western and its star. Spaghetti westerns like A Fistful of Dollars are beloved in the over-the-top dancehall scene.

"What is a dance but a saloon?" asks Channer. "Saloons get shot up and dances get shot up. Motorcycles are like horses, and people bring their good guys and their bad guys. But I think also, dancehall is good music for people to do group dancing to. You think of line dancing in country music and then you look at the way in which group dancing is really popular in dancehall — they connect."

Still, Channer says, it surprises people that Jamaicans like country music because Jamaica is a predominantly black country, and, in the U.S., country music carries a certain racial history and baggage.

"Jamaica has such a strong music tradition of its own, and a lot of that music tradition is involved in struggle against a, sort of, world power structure which I conceived of as white. And we conceive of country music as white," he says. "But I think a good story is a good story. And Kenny Rogers is a good storyteller."

Stories are what it all comes down to, says reggae singer Beres Hammond, who's also featured on Reggae's Gone Country.

He says, "Country tells stories. It tells about the home and the heart and the breaking up and the getting back together and the new person in your life, and it's almost like soap. And you know how soap is — it keeps you glued to your television because you want to know where the next chapter is."

This narrative tradition runs deep in folk music across the Caribbean. And there may even be a social currency that appeals to country listeners, says University of the West Indies professor and blogger Annie Paul.

"Country and western is music that comes from the people at the bottom," she says, "so maybe there's some sort of sympathy there."

NPR AUDIO LINK:
www.npr.org/blogs/therecord/2011/09/01/140120452/reggae-loves-country-a-50-year- romance