7 Bob Marley 7

Bob Marley

(b. Feb. 6, 1945, Nine Miles, St. Ann, Jam.—d. May 11, 1981, Miami,
Fla., U.S.)

T

he thoughtful, ongoing distillation of early ska, rock
steady, and reggae forms by Jamaican singer-
songwriter Bob Marley blossomed in the 1970s into an
electrifying rock-influenced hybrid that made the musi-
cian an international superstar.
The son of a white rural overseer, Norval Sinclair
Marley, and the black daughter of a local custos (respected
backwoods squire), the former Cedella Malcolm, Bob
Marley would forever remain the unique product of parallel
worlds—his poetic worldview was shaped by the country-
side, his music by the tough West Kingston ghetto streets.
Marley’s maternal grandfather was not just a prosperous
farmer but also a bush doctor adept at the mysticism-
steeped herbal healing that guaranteed respect in Jamaica’s
remote hill country. As a child Marley was known for his
shy aloofness, his startling stare, and his penchant for palm
reading. Virtually kidnapped by his absentee father (who
had been disinherited by his own prominent family for
marrying a black woman), the preadolescent Marley was
taken to live with an elderly woman in Kingston until a
family friend rediscovered the boy by chance and returned
him to Nine Miles.
By his early teens Marley was back in West Kingston,
living in a government-subsidized tenement in Trench
Town, a desperately poor slum. In the early 1960s, while a
schoolboy serving an apprenticeship as a welder, Marley
was exposed to the languid, jazz-infected shuffle-beat
rhythms of ska, a Jamaican amalgam of American rhythm
and blues and native mento (folk-calypso) strains then
catching on commercially. Marley was a fan of Fats