Linstead Market

The story

"Linstead Market" is a Jamaican folk song of the mento type. It tells of a mother who takes her ackee fruit to the market but sells none of it, so that her children will go hungry. Possibly its earliest printing with words is in Walter Jekyll's book Jamaican Song and Story (1907), where it is item 121, on pages 219–220; Jekyll wrote its melody in 6/8 time, while every later printing named here is in 2/4 or 4/4.

In 1925 Helen H. Roberts published a study of folk-song variants based on her fieldwork in Jamaica. She reproduced Jekyll's version and twelve variants, among them one sung in Christiana; in some of them "Sollas market" takes the place of "Linstead market" (Sollas market became Jubilee Market, on West Queen Street in Kingston). In 1975 Oxford University Press published the song in Olive Lewin's collection of Jamaican folk songs for children. Lewin wrote that Linstead Market was still a picturesque small-town market, and that the song, now often taken much faster for dancing, was first sung slowly and plaintively by a mother who could not sell enough at the market to feed her children. The quatty it names was worth a penny and a half; it was not a minted coin but a standard unit of buying and selling, goods being sold in amounts worth a quatty or multiples of it.

The song has been arranged many times. Arthur Benjamin published it for solo voice and piano (Boosey & Hawkes, 1947), and A. H. Green for choir (Oxford University Press, 1967). The King's Singers recorded it in 1992, and the English folk group The Spinners recorded it with their Caribbean singer Cliff Hall; the Cuban group La Sonora Matancera covered it in 1957 in English and Spanish, and the pianist Monty Alexander released a live version, recorded in 2012, on an album of 2014, calling it "one of the staples of the Mento repertoire". Brian Raphael Nabors arranged it for string quartet in 2018. It also became a hymn tune: as LINSTEAD, arranged by Doreen Potter in Break Not the Circle (Hope Publishing, 1975) with a text by Fred Kaan, it appears in several hymnals, among them the Presbyterian Hymnal (1990) and Hymns Ancient & Modern New Standard (1983).

What it says

A market woman's lament. She has carried her ackee to Linstead market and sold not even a quatty's worth, and goes home to a night with no light and nothing to eat, for herself or her children. Sung slowly it is plaintive; taken fast, as it often is today, it became a dance tune.

The words