The Life and Times of Bob Marley

In the 1950s, Cedella moved to Kingston -- the only place in Jamaica where any future of consequence could be realized. She and her son made their home in a government tenant yard, a crowded area where poor people lived, virtually all of them black. The yard they settled in, Trench Town, was made up of row upon row of cheap corrugated metal and tar-paper one-room shacks, generally with no plumbing. It was a place where your dreams might raise you or kill you, but you would have to live and act hard in either case. To Cedella's dismay, her son began to come into his own there -- to find a sense of community and purpose amid rough conditions and rough company, including the local street gangs. These gangs evolved soon enough into a faction called Rude Boys -- teenagers and young adults who dressed sharp, acted insolent and knew how to fight. Kingston hated the Rude Boys, and police and politicians had vowed to eradicate them.

It was in this setting of grim delimitation that Marley first found what would give his life purpose: Kingston's burgeoning and eccentric rhythm & blues scene. In the late 1940s, Jamaican youth had started to catch the fever of America's urban popular music -- in particular, the earthy and polyrhythmic dance and blues sounds of New Orleans. By the 1960s, Kingston was producing its own form of R&B: a taut, tricky and intense music in which rhythms shifted their accents to the offbeat -- almost an inversion of American rock & roll and funk. This new Jamaican music was, like American R&B, the long-term result of how black music survived and evolved as a means of maintaining community in unsympathetic lands. It was music that gave a displaced population a way to tell truths about their lives and a way of claiming victory over daily misery, or at least of finding a respite.

Jamaica's popular music -- from calypso to mento -- had always served as a means to spread stories, about neighbors' moral failures or the overlord society's duplicity. The commentary could be clever and merciless, and the music that Marley first began to play had the tempo to carry such sharp purposes. It was called ska (after its scratchboardlike rhythms), and just as R&B and rock & roll had been viewed in America as disruptive and immoral, Jamaica's politicians, ministers and newspapers looked upon ska as trash: a dangerous music from the ghetto that helped fuel the Rude Boys' violence. But the Rude Boys would soon receive an unexpected jolt of validation.

Cedella Marley was worried that her son had grown too comfortable with ghetto life and was too close to the Rude Boys. There were frequent fights, even stabbings, in the Trench Town streets and at ska dances.