ABSTRACT
The previous chapter established dancehall and Pentecostal churches in Jamaica as cultural and religious activities of the urban and rural poor. Both reworked African and African American materials (music and religion) to produce distinctive Jamaican inflections in music and worship respectively. Consequently, the arrival of Jamaicans in Britain as part of post-war West Indian immigration provided a context for these cultural and religious traditions to be established and transformed. This was not the first time that the cultures of Black Jamaicans were present, since during and immediately after the Second World War, Caribbean men had performed at English music halls.1 Furthermore, Iain MacRobert states that there was a Black Pentecostal independent church in London from 1908.2 Also, some twenty years after the Azusa Street Revival, there were traces of Black Christianity in Hornsey in the 1930s.3 Large-scale immigration would present new opportunities for increased cultural and religious expression.
