John Storm Roberts (February 24, 1936 – November 29, 2009[1]) was a British-born, U.S.-based ethnomusicologist, writer and record producer.
Roberts grew up listening to jazz, blues, calypso and flamenco records that his father brought back from business trips abroad.
In the late 1960s, he produced programs about African music for the BBC World Service.
In 1972, Roberts traveled to the Caribbean Islands to make field recordings of traditional music, which were released as Caribbean Island Music: Songs and Dances of Haiti, The Dominican Republic and Jamaica on Nonesuch Records as part of their Explorer Series.
In his next book, The Latin Tinge (1979), Roberts wrote "virtually all of the major popular forms — Tin Pan Alley, stage and film music, jazz, rhythm-and-blues, country music, rock — have been affected throughout their development by the idioms of Brazil, Cuba, or Mexico.