Rise of Black Music in Britain / Various

Two CD collection. In 1948, the Empire Windrush famously docked at Tilbury, carrying 493 passengers from Jamaica and Trinidad (plus, by all accounts, one stowaway!). Pathe News were among the media gathered there to meet them, and a remarkable piece of newsreel footage survives in which the freshly disembarked King of Calypso, Lord Kitchener, serenades everyone with impromptu version of 'London Belongs to Me'. And although this by no means marked the birth of black music in the UK (it wasn't even the first boat-load of migrants from the West Indies - a smaller vessel, the Almazora, had delivered some 200 Jamaican passengers to Southampton six months earlier), the symbolic landing of the Windrush is very much seen as a rallying point for much of what would follow, socially, artistically and musically.