I see something went wrong with that link I gave in an earlier post to an article on a BBC site - The First Black Britons (Moral - always check your links with the Preview button.)

There is lots of evidence of black people in that period being involved in various types of entertainment and musical activity, and that means having an input into how it developed.

For example, from that article I linked to: A newspaper report from 1764 also describes how 57 black men and women ate, drank and entertained themselves with dancing and music - from violins, French horns and other instruments - until four in the morning, at a public-house in Fleet Street.

My impression is however that most of the time this kind of involvement would be as part of general music-making - in the same way that black sailors sang shanties along with their white crewmates.