The Jamaica Cultural Development Commission (JCDC) pays homage to a stalwart of Jamaican folk, a true Jamaican patriot, Hon. Dr. Olive Lewin. The JCDC’s Annual Music Competition in the Festival of Performing Arts has benefitted tremendously from her research and documentation of traditional folk music. The Commission continues to utilize her wealth of knowledge and expertise to guide the execution of the development and preservation of folk music.

We hail her as a quintessential Jamaican folklorist who was an impressive musical heritage edifice and who for many years helped to build brand Jamaica and to concretize a strong sense of national pride and patriotism.  She has made the Jamaican cultural landscape more meaningful, vibrant and effervescent by rooting the nation in its traditional songs of inspiration, victory and creativity.  

Dr. Lewin was a multifaceted individual who spent many years documenting, preserving and sharing the evolution of Jamaica’s traditional folk life. Subsequently, her career spanned as an ethnomusicologist, author, well- earned educator par excellence, folklorist, and social anthropologist. As an expert in her field, for more than 50 years she taught, researched, conducted workshops and lectured locally and internationally. She had served as guests of many governments on cultural projects, lectured extensively at universities and music schools abroad, and had attended several UNESCO cultural conferences.

An author of several books, she captured the roots and the oral history of the ‘deep’   folk culture of Jamaica in a profound way. She also hosted two radio shows – Sunday Promenade and Music From Around The World which demonstrated her immense love for music and defining its rightful place in cultural civilization and preserving the memories and evolution of a people in time and place. As a columnist, Jamaica and the world have benefited from her riveting social commentaries in ‘Spotlight on Music’.
   
As a newly independent nation in 1962, the work of developing our national identity was very active before this time and as such, the work of this extraordinary folklorist in the 1960s only intensified and made better the folk culture Jamaica. The work of developing our national identity was ongoing, but on becoming an independent nation in 1962, the work of this extraordinary folklorist helped to intensify and improve the Jamaican folk culture. It was during the 1960s that she was commissioned to research and document local folk songs. In the 1980s, she spearheaded the Jamaica Memory Bank Project which focused on the recollections of Jamaicans from all walks of life, recording and transcribing their stories.

She received numerous awards and recognitions in her lifetime. Her immense contributions are by no means in vain and will continue to mould the minds of all Jamaicans and the world at large of what it means to be a ‘real-born Jamaican’. Taking Jamaica’s culture to the world.  The JCDC salutes her legendary role in this regard.

Hon.  Dr.  Olive Lewin may have been small in stature but tallawah!