The couple married in 1944 and Robert Nesta Marley was born on February 6, 1945. His mother was an eighteen-year-old black girl called Cedella Booker while his father was Captain Norval Marley, a 50-year-old white quartermaster attached to the British West Indian Regiment. It was the start of a new religion called Rastafari.įifteen years later, in Rhoden Hall to the north of Jamaica, Bob Marley was born. The Marcus Garvey followers in Jamaica, consulting their New Testaments for a sign, believed Haile Selassie was the black king whom Garvey had prophesied would deliver the Negro race. As the first step in this dream, Garvey founded the Black Star Line, a steamship company which, in popular imagination at least, was to take the black population from America and the Caribbean back to their homeland of Africa.Ī few years later, in 1930, Ras Tafari Makonnen was crowned Emperor of Ethiopia and took a new name, Haile Selassie, The Emperor claimed to be the 225th ruler in a line that stretched back to Menelik, the son of Solomon and Sheba.
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The organisation advocated the creation of a new black state in Africa, free from white domination. Jamaica, however, remained a rural community which, without the industrialisation of its northern neighbour, was more closely rooted to its African legacy.īy the start of the twentieth century that African heritage was given political expression by Marcus Garvey, a shrewd Jamaican preacher and entrepreneur who founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). This hybrid culture, of course, had parallels with the emerging black society in America.
They have permeated the very essence of Jamaica’s culture, from the plantation of the mid-nineteenth century to the popular music of our own times.Īlthough slavery was abolished in 1834, the Africans and their descendants developed their own culture with half-remembered African traditions mingled with the customs of the British. The days of slavery are a recent folk memory on the island. It is important to consider the roots of this legend: the first superstar from the Third World, Bob Marley was one of the most charismatic and challenging performers of our time and his music could have been created from only one source: the street culture of Jamaica.
“His music was pure rock, in the sense that it was a public expression of a private truth.” “He’s taken his place alongside James Brown and Sly Stone as a pervasive influence on R & B”, says the American critic Timothy White, author of the acclaimed Bob Marley biography CATCH A FIRE: THE LIFE OF BOB MARLEY. Bob Marley & the Wailers worked their way into the very fabric of our lives. Bob Marley, the Natural Mystic, may yet prove to be the most significant musical artist of the twentieth century.īob Marley gave the world brilliant and evocative music his work stretched across nearly two decades and yet still remains timeless and universal. The tiny Third World country of Jamaica has produced an artist who has transcended all categories, classes, and creeds through a combination of innate modesty and profound wisdom. “When you need to refer to a certain situation or crisis, there will always be a Bob Marley song that will relate to it. “The reservoir of music he has left behind is like an encyclopedia,” says Judy Mowatt of the I-Threes. He left behind the most remarkable body of recorded work. And although it is sometimes said that there are no facts in Jamaica, there is one more thing of which we can be certain: Bob Marley never wrote a bad song. In the clear Jamaican sunlight you can pick out the component parts of which the myth of Bob Marley is comprised: the sadness, the love, the understanding, the Godgiven talent. Not just among Jamaicans, but also the Hopi Indians of New Mexico and the Maoris of New Zealand, in Indonesia and India, and especially in those parts of West Africa from wihch slaves were plucked and taken to the New World, Bob is seen as a redeemer figure returning to lead this. And his audience continues to widen: to westerners Bob’s apocalyptic truths prove inspirational and life-changing in the Third World his impact goes much further. The last Bob Marley and the Wailers tour in 1980 attracted the largest audiences at that time for any musical act in Europe.īob’s story is that of an archetype, which is why it continues to have such a powerful and ever-growing resonance: it embodies political repression, metaphysical and artistic insights, gangland warfare and various periods of mystical wilderness. His departure from this planet came at a point when his vision of One World, One Love - inspired by his belief in Rastafari - was beginning to be heard and felt. Bob Marley was a hero figure, in the classic mythological sense.
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