The making of Bob Marley

ROBERT Nesta Marley died of cancer on May 11 1981, at a premature age of 36. By then he was well known to college kids world wide, but few could have foreseen the celebrity he had attained since.

ROBERT Nesta Marley died of cancer on May 11 1981, at a premature age of 36. By then he was well known to college kids world wide, but few could have foreseen the celebrity he had attained since.

Born in Jamaica he is the only Third World performer to be elected to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1999, the British Broadcasting Corporation named his One Love the “song of the millennium” the same year Time declared his 1977 Exodus the “best album of the 20th century”.

Voted the third greatest song writer of all time in a 2001 BBC poll (behind Bob Dylan and John Lennon). Marley had sold an estimated of 50 million records world wide.

On the 2007 Forbes  list of “top earning dead celebrities” he ranked twelfth with his estate earning an estimated $4 million.

His posthumous greatest hits collection, Legend (1984) is among the top selling compilation of all time.

Thirty three years after his death, there is perhaps no country where his songs of wry ballads and martial anthems with soothing or stirring melodies are not familiar.

Bob Marley
Bob Marley

Marley was a brilliant synthesis of musical styles and his influence on Reggae can still be heard from rock to rap to samba to jazz.

An ingenious song writer who was an electrifying performer, he made music whose “thud–sobbing” as Derek Walcott once wrote evokes a “sadness as real as the smell of rain on dry earth”.

He used the language of the King James Bible to sing of romance and revolution, emancipation and freedom. When they were written, his songs evoked in many, especially in Africa, the hopes that came with national sovereignty in a decolonising age.

However, they now transcend  their time and place and are heard from Liverpool to Lagos, Tenesse to Tibet, Sydney to Sao Paulo.

The songs tell a familiar story of black slaves, mainly west Africans brought to work in Jamaica’s fields of indigo and sugar cane combining their own diverse cultures with those they found and making something new.

Like many of his contemporaries, young country people who migrated to the city seeking work, only to end up in its swelling slums, Marley absorbed the political and musical currents that flowed through Jamaica and its capital Kingston in the years before and after its independence in 1962.

Among the sounds were spirituals, sung in clapboard churches and folk songs toiled and danced to in fields and shacks: Newer rhythms from neighbouring islands: Mambo from Cuba calypso from Trinidad and increasing with the advent of the transistor radio and the spread of “sound systems” (turntables and enormous loud speakers that made music block parties possible) American doo-wop and rhythm and blues.

In a city full of artists and entrepreneurs seeking to forge a new national culture, Marley and his peers, like many others in the third world at the time adapted these sounds to their lives on the margins.

From the early 1960s Marley became part of the rapid evolution of Jamaican popular music: Mento, the calypso – inflected dance style dominant in the 1950s, gave way by the decade’s end to the kinetic hop called Ska and then in the mid 1960s to the languid shuffle called Rock Steady: Finally a few years later, came the driving, spacious sound of reggae: The style Marley brought to a world wide audience.

Born in 1945 in the hills of Jamaica’s garden Parish of St Ann, Marley descended from Maroons, fugitive slaves who had waged a guerilla war against the British for the better part of two centuries.

Young Nesta spent his early years in the dusty hamlet of 9 Miles, but moved to Kingston at the age of twelve, settling in  Trenchtown, the one time squatter camp just west of the city centre that had absorbed the postwar influx from the country side.

Marley witnessed first hand poverty  of the “sufferahs” whose aspirations he would later give voice to in his songs.

In 1972 Marley was 27-years old-and had several local hit songs, he married a local girl named Rita Anderson (who later became part of his vocal collaborator as one of the I-threes )and spent time working in the United States where his mother had migrated in the early 1960s.

Marley became drawn to Rastafarianism the faith that he would make synonymous with reggae. His lyrics were increasingly influenced by the distinctive biblical and political language used by Rastafarians in Jamaica.

The sect had been born in Kingston a few decades before, when a group of Marcus Garvey’s followers celebrated the 1930 coronation of Haile Selassie 1 as emperor of Ethiopia as a fulfilment of Garvey’s supposed prophecy to “look to the East for the crowning of the African King”.

The Rastafarians revered Selassie as the living Christ and the sect’s impoverished members among them Kingston musicians sang hymns of “going home to an Ethiopian  Zion”.

Developing an elaborate eschatology drawn from the King James Bible, their outlook and speech were shaped by the scriptures, they frowned on modern medicine and refused to eat meat, encouraged the ritual of smoking of marijuana (for good meditation according to their reading of the Old Testament.

Moreover, citing the Samsonite edict of Leviticus 21:15 (they shall not make baldness upon their head) they prohibited cutting hair.

For Jamaica proliferating Rastafarians who already regarded Haile Selassie as divine, Marley attained the status of prophet. For example: After being shot at his home in March 1976, Marley left Jamaica and spent a year among West Indians émigrés in Britain.

The following year he released the album Exodus. The Biblical tale of Exodus evokes deliverance from bondage and movement  towards home or away from it, movement without the certitude of earthly sanctuary at it’s start or end.

To his admirers, Marley is symbolic of the need not merely for freedom, but for skepticism as well. He is the maker ,above all of songs that decry the pains of life in the Babylon he abhorred but which proves that those oppressions could as his lyrics went be “brutalised with music”.