Bob Marley: 1945-1981

Robert Nesta Marley was born in the rural parish of St. Ann, Jamaica, on February 6th, 1945, to Norval Marley, a white, fiftyish British army captain stationed on the island, and his seventeen-year-old Jamaican wife, Cedella. Marley was efficacious in his ability to straddle his bloodlines. "He was just like any other little boy, always playful, lovin' and cooperative with his friends," says Cedella Marley Booker (she remarried in 1963). "But sometimes he was a little selfish. And he always looked to me like he was hiding his true feelin's."

Bob was eight years old when his parents separated. His mother decided to give up her tiny grocery store in Alva, a village near the district of Nine Miles, Rhoden Hall, and move to Trench Town. His father died two years later. "I believe it was malaria," says Mrs. Booker.

In their early days in Kingston, Bob's mother made ends meet by working as a cook or servant. Although the two lived modestly, Mrs. Booker, disliking the area's inferior public-school system, struggled to earn enough to send Bob to private institutions.

But she wasn't breaking her back doing other people's wash so her son could boot a soccer ball off the tumblegown walls of Babylon, and as soon as Bob completed grammar school, she insisted he settle on a trade.

"I really didn't choose anything special as a job for him," she says. "I knew men who were doing welding for a livin', and I suggested that he go down to the shop and make himself an apprentice. He hated it. One day he was welding some steel and a piece of metal flew off and got stuck right in the white of his eye, and he had to go to the hospital twice to have it taken out. It caused him terrible pain; it even hurt for him to cry."

At the time, the Marley's were sharing a roof with best friend Bunny Wailer and his father, Thaddius Livingston. Once his eye healed, Bob convinced his mother that he could make a more comfortable living pursuing a musical career with Bunny. "Bob wrote little songs, and then he and Bunny would sing them," his mother says. "Sometimes I'd teach him a tune like 'I'm Going to Lay My Sins Down at the Riverside.'"

Bunny says that he constructed a guitar out of "a bamboo staff, the fine wires from an electric cable and a large sardine can." He and Bob made do with the crude instrument until Peter Tosh, who lived on nearby West Road, joined in with his battered acoustic guitar. They formed a group and called themselves the Teenagers, the Wailing Rudeboys and then the Wailing Wailers, playing in local "yards" for tips and eventually in small clubs and talent shows in Kingston theaters.

In 1963, Mrs. Booker immigrated to Delaware and moved in with relatives. Because of the expense, Bob stayed behind in the care of Mr. Livingston and other friends. Moreover, he was committed to his musical career in Jamaica, since the Wailers had grown, with the guidance of Joe Higgs (half of the popular singing duo Higgs and Wilson), into a group worthy of a recording contract. Mrs. Booker sent for her son in 1964, just as the Wailers were establishing a relationship with Studio One, one of the top three recording outfits on the island, so he asked to remain in Jamaica.

Finally in 1966, he paid his mother a visit, but he had little use for the United States, and Delaware in particular. By his own admission, "Everything was too fast, too noisy, too rush-rush." Nonetheless, he prolonged his stay to earn money to start his own record label back home, and thus put some distance between himself and the predatory producers he and the Wailers were forced to deal with.

Among the jobs he held, under the alias Donald Marley, were a stint as a DuPont lab assistant and a short stretch on the night shift at a warehouse and on the assembly line of a nearby Chrysler plant. The introverted singer made few friends, preferring to merely tolerate the present and fantasize about the future. In his mother's words, he was "lost without his musician friends."

On weekends, he lolled around the house, picking out simple melodies on a cheap acoustic guitar and writing lyrics in a little book, a combination diary and songwriting ledger that he guarded judiciously. One of the songs that emerged from that private journal was "It's Alright," a caustic, exhortatory dance tune he cut in the late Sixties for Lee Perry's Jamaican record company, Upsetter.

When Marley first recorded the song, it featured a bouncy, whoa-whoa chorus and antagonistic touts of "Do you like it hot or cold?" His temper had cooled by the time he recorded the song as "Night Shift" in the mid-Seventies, but the words changed only slightly, the power of one young man's determination shining through as he described his lonely, ass-backward work schedule:

The sun shall not smite I by day
Nor the moon by night
And everything that I do shall be upfull and right . . .
Working on the night shift
With the forklift . . .

Marley's stay in Delaware reportedly came to an end when the draft board discovered the lean West Indian after he applied for social security. But when asked about his departure, Bob would shrug and maintain that the ultimate impetus for his flight came from a far less mundane quarter.