The Life and Times of Bob Marley

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.

Marley, though small and slight, was known as a force in Trench Town. He even had a street name: Tuff Gong. But he had no aspiration for a criminal life. “Don’t worry,” he told his mother. “I don’t work for them.” The truth was, Marley found qualities of ruthless honesty, courage and rough beauty in tenement-yard community, and he didn’t necessarily want to transcend or escape it — instead, he wanted to describe its reality and to speak for its populace, which was subject to not only destitution but easy condemnation as well. He had already written a song about cheap moralism, “Judge Not,” recorded it with one of Kingston’s leading producers, Leslie Kong, and released it in 1963 — the same year that the Beatles and Bob Dylan were making their music felt. That year, Marley also formed a vocal group with his childhood friend Neville Livingston (the son of Cedella’s boyfriend, who later became known as Bunny Wailer) and Peter McIntosh, a tall guitar player who would shorten his name to Peter Tosh. The group spent considerable time sharpening its vocal harmonies with singer Joe Higgs. Higgs had done some work for Clement “Coxsone” Dodd, Kingston’s dominant record producer, who also ran the scene’s most successful recording house, Studio One. In addition, Dodd presided over the island’s most popular sound system — a sort of DJ booth on wheels that played the new American and Jamaican sounds at makeshift dance halls, until the police would bust them up, breaking heads and looking for Rude Boys who might be carrying knives or marijuana.

Marley and the others auditioned several original songs for Dodd in 1963, including one that he had written out of deference to his mother’s concerns, called “Simmer Down.” It was a plea to the local gangs to back off from violence before ruling powers stepped into the situation, and it was set to an aggressive beat that might well excite the sort of frenzy that the song’s words disavowed. Dodd recorded the tune the next day with his best studio musicians, the Skatalites, and that same night he played the record at one of his sound-system affairs. It was an immediate sensation, and for good reason: For the first time, a voice from the ghetto was speaking to others who lived in the same straits, acknowledging their existence and giving voice to their troubles, and that breakthrough had a transformative effect, on both the scene and on Marley and his group, who would call themselves the Wailing Wailers and, finally, the Wailers. (The name was meant to describe somebody who called out from the ghetto — a sufferer and witness.) Marley had already found one of the major themes that would characterize his songwriting through his entire career.

Dodd was so impressed with Marley’s work ethic that he entrusted him with rehearsing several of Studio One’s other vocal groups, including the Soulettes — a female singing trio that featured a teenage single mother and nursing student named Rita Anderson, who had a dream of becoming Jamaica’s Diana Ross. Marley had eyes for other women during this time — he always would — but he was drawn to Anderson for her devotion as a mother. In turn, she felt a need to protect Marley, who now lived alone in the back of Dodd’s studio, after his mother had finally tired of the Kingston life and moved to Delaware. Rita and Marley married in 1966, just days before he gave in to his mother’s insistence that he come visit her and try to establish a home in America. He didn’t stay long. Marley didn’t like the pace of life in America, nor the circumscribed job opportunities available to black men. He missed his wife and home. While he’d been gone, though, something significant happened in Jamaica that would utterly transfigure Marley’s life and destiny: A Living God had visited Marley’s homeland and walked on its soil.

The living God’s name was Haile Selassie, the emperor of Ethiopia, and the product of a complicated strand of history that marked the lives of Marley and Jamaica. Selassie’s importance for Jamaicans began in the life of another man, Marcus Garvey — an early-twentieth-century activist who encouraged blacks to look to their African heritage and to create their own destinies apart from the ones imposed on them by America and by European colonialism. According to a persistent myth, Garvey instructed his followers in 1927 to look to Africa for the crowning of a black king, as a sign that a messiah was at hand. In point of fact, Garvey never uttered such a prophecy, but the claim remains attributed to him to this day. In 1930, when a young man named Ras Tafari maneuvered his way onto the throne of Ethiopia, the prophecy that Garvey never proclaimed took on the power of the word made flesh for many. Selassie was the Living God, the reinstatement of the rightful Jehovah to the earth and a beacon of hope for the world’s long-suffering black diaspora.

In Jamaica, a cult called Ras Tafari sprang up around this belief in the 1930s. Rastafarianism developed as a mystical Judeo-Christian faith with a vision of Africa, in particular, Ethiopia, as the true Zion. The Rastafarians never had a true doctrine but rather a set of folk wisdoms and a worldview. One of their beliefs was that marijuana — which the Rastas called ganja — was a sacramental herb that brought its users into a deeper knowledge of themselves. More important, Rastas had an apocalyptic vision. They saw Western society as the modern kingdom of Babylon, corrupt and murderous and built on the suffering of the world’s oppressed. Accordingly, Rastas believed that Babylon must fall — though they would not themselves raise up arms to bring its end; violence belonged rightfully to God. Until Babylon fell, according to one legend, the Rastas would not cut their hair. They grew it long in a fearsome appearance called dreadlocks. The Rastas lived as a peaceful people who would not work in Babylon’s economic system and would not vote for its politicians. Jamaican society, though, believed it saw a glimmer of revolt in the Rastas, and for decades they had been treated as the island’s most despised population.