Bob Marley: 1945-1981

While asleep at home one afternoon, he had a dream wherein a man attired in khaki and a weathered hat appeared, described himself as an emissary for the deceased Norval Marley and presented Bob with a ring set with a curious black jewel. He awoke from his mystical reverie and described the vision to his mother. She then produced the very ring in the dream, and Marley slipped in on his finger.

But it made him extremely uncomfortable to wear it, and he reasoned that he was being tested by God to ascertain whether he was more interested in personal gain than in spiritual fulfillment. He removed the ring and handed it back to his mother. After he returned to Trench Town, the message of the dream was interpreted further by Mortimer Planner, a Rasta elder and sometime record producer active in the ganja trade.

Bob Marley subsequently embraced the beliefs of the Rastafarians, who take their name from Lij Ras Tafari Makonnen, the given name of Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie; they also draw a good deal of their ideology from Marcus Garvey's back-to-Africa admonishments during the Twenties and Thirties, as well as from the Coptic and King James Bibles.

Slowly but surely, Marley let his Sam Cooke haircut go to seed, allowing the lengthening tresses to wind themselves into dreadlocks. He shunned alcohol, tobacco, meat, certain predatory species of marine life and food prepared with salt. Anything, in short, that was not I-tal, a Rasta term meaning "pure" or "natural."

During a 1977 U.S. concert tour to support his Rastaman Vibration album, Marley was sitting in a hotel room, reading a newspaper article that ridiculed his patois. He slammed the paper on the table. "Fucking hell!" he raged. "Tell me, why do they make fun of me? Why do they make fun of Rasta?!" He began to spew out his frustration with those who mocked his dreadlocks, his dialect, his religion, his heritage. He said that he once gave an autograph to a journalist who then told him he was surprised Marley could write, and that he pointed out errors in a story to another reporter who could not conceal his amazement that this rope-haired Rastafarian knew how to read.

Marley was equally distraught over what he saw as the racism and ignorance of critics who damned his music along thematic lines while making no attempt to investigate its underpinnings, to learn that it was steeped in folklore, in the country maxims he had been raised on, in Rastafarian tenets. But what cut deepest was when some black DJs and station programmers in the United States called his records and those of his colleagues "jungle music" and "slave music."

Still, Bob Marley was one of the most revered figures in the third world. Wherever he traveled in the Caribbean or Africa (and Europe, for that matter), he sparked enormous outpourings of affection and admiration. A hero of mythic proportions in his own country, where he was honored with a state funeral, Marley had been given a special citation by the United Nations in 1979 on behalf of third-world nations. And it was no accident that when Rhodesia became the independent state of Zimbabwe the next year, the first words spoken following the order to lower the British flag and raise the new standard were, "Ladies and gentlemen, Bob Marley and the Wailers!" The government had invited Marley and his band to perform at the ceremony marking the birth of a nation. An inspiration for black freedom fighters the world over, he was mobbed in Nigeria, Gabon and every other African country he played in or visited. When his death was announced, the degree of devastation felt beyond our borders was incalculable.

Bob Marley believed that he and his loved ones would one day be free of the degradation and moral turpitude of Babylon, a land without borders in which men sin and suffer for it. He was certain that someday he would enter Zion, the promised land where Jah, His Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie I, Power of the Holy Trinity, 225th ruler of the 3000-year-old Ethiopian Empire, Lord of Lords, King of Kings, Heir to the Throne of Solomon, Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah, would take his hand. Across time and space they would keep that sacred appointment. You had to envy a man with so profound a faith, and you could not fail to be affected by the fervor of his answer in song to those who claimed that Selassie had died in 1975.