OST OF THE TIME,
when Cedella Marley’s son
Skip begins to sing, she
closes her eyes. Not out of
any parental apprehension
or superstition, but so she
can listen for pitch and
sharpness — a remnant of
the time she spent singing with her siblings Ziggy,
Stephen and Sharon as part of The Melody Makers
in the 1980 s and ’ 90 s.
These days, she has been hearing Skip sing a lot
more often. While half of the world is confined
at home due to the coronavirus pandemic, the
23 - year-old songwriter-musician is livestream-
ing pop-up concerts and interacting with his fans
online. Cedella and Skip are themselves isolating in
their home in Miami — all of the Marley offspring
but Ziggy and Karen, who are in Los Angeles, live
near each other in Miami — where a home studio
allows Skip to continue working on his debut EP,
due out this summer on Island Records.
One song that Skip keeps coming back to in his
livestreams is “So Much Trouble in the World,”
an album cut from his grandfather Bob Marley’s
1979 album, Survival. “It’s not one of daddy’s
most popular songs, but I think going through
this pandemic, it has become one of those songs
that people are kind of singing to themselves, you
know?” muses Cedella, 52 , over the phone in early
April. “And then if you listen to the lyrics — ‘All we
have to do is give a little’ — that’s what we really
have to do as we go through this.”
This is a big year for the Marley family. Feb. 6
marks what would have been patriarch Bob Mar-
ley’s 75 th birthday. And Cedella — as CEO of both
the family’s record label/distributor Tuff Gong
International and the Bob Marley Museum, and,
alongside Ziggy and Stephen, managing partner of
Marley Holdings, which conducts most of the fam-
ily’s business — has helped plan a series of events
and projects intended to turn the entirety of 2020
into a celebration of her father. That includes new
reissues from a newly reopened pressing plant;
EPs of new covers; new music videos for the iconic
songs from his greatest-hits collection Legend;
a photo book; a multipart documentary series
that began airing on YouTube in February; and
what was supposed to be a slew of live shows and
exhibitions in both Jamaica and the United States.
In conjunction with Bob’s longtime label Island
Records and Universal Music Enterprises (UMe)
— the catalog wing of Island’s parent company,
which manages his Island catalog — as well as
with publisher Primary Wave, the family began the
yearlong celebration with a series of events lead-
ing up to the Grammys in January, with a slate of
new announcements still to come.
But that was before the coronavirus pandemic
swept across the globe, bringing national econo-
mies to a standstill and halting daily life. Several
of the Marley events, performances and exhibi-
tions have been postponed, and even the opera-
tion of the pressing plant is in question, althoughRohan Marley photographed Feb. 5
at Tuff Gong Records in Kingston.36 BILLBOARD • APRIL 25 , 20208fea_coverstory_marleys_lo [P]_27879288.indd 36 4/22/20 3:32 PM