Foreword:
This series is dedicated to those who have been influential in their chosen genre and have unfortunately passed on to rock and roll heaven. The subjects can and will be singers, songwriters, musicians, session players, sidemen, producers, recording engineers and arrangers.
If you have someone that you would like us to look at their career in retrospect, feel free to contribute to this series. Keep in mind that the purpose is to discuss an influential individual who was either famous or contributed to the success of others in a profound manner.
In 1963 a movement that would ultimately and very profoundly influence the world in so many ways found a voice to carry their message and carry it he did with the grace and ease of one who was born and raised to succeed. His followers gave him the respect usually reserved for a monarch.
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A Jamaican passport official would later swap his first and middle names. His father Norval Sinclair Marley was a white Jamaican of English descent. Norval married Cedella Booker, a black Jamaican who was eighteen years old Norval’s job often as a naval officer often took him away from his family. In 1955, when Bob Marley was 10 years old, his father died of a heart attack at age 60.
Life was not so easy for Bob Marley in his formative years. He suffered racial prejudice as a youth and because of his mixed racial origins he faced questions about his own racial identity throughout his life. He once reflected:
“I don't have prejudice against himself. My father was a white and my mother was black. Them call me half-caste or whatever. Me don't dip on nobody's side. Me don't dip on the black man's side nor the white man's side. Me dip on God's side, the one who create me and cause me to come from black and white.”
Ultimately the environment he grew up became strongly reflected in his music. He became friends with Neville "Bunny" Livingston (later known as Bunny Wailer), with whom he started to play music. He left school at the age of 14 to make music with Joe Higgs, a local singer and devout Rastafari. It was at a jam session with Higgs and Livingston that Marley met Peter McIntosh (later known as Peter Tosh), who had similar musical ambitions.
In 1962, Marley recorded his first two singles, "Judge Not" and "One Cup of Coffee", with local music producer Leslie Kong. These songs, released on the Beverley's label under the pseudonym of Bobby Martell
In 1963 his passion for music began to pay dividends. Bob Marley, Bunny Livingston, Peter McIntosh, Junior Braithwaite, Beverley Kelso, and Cherry Smith formed a ska and rocksteady group, calling themselves "The Teenagers". They later changed their name to "The Wailing Rudeboys", then to "The Wailing Wailers", at which point they were discovered by record producer Coxsone Dodd, and finally to "The Wailers". By 1966, Braithwaite, Kelso, and Smith had left The Wailers, leaving the core trio of Marley, Livingston, and McIntosh.
The Wailers' first album, Catch A Fire, was released worldwide in 1973, and sold well. It was followed a year later by Burnin', which included the songs "Get Up, Stand Up" and "I Shot The Sheriff" and the rest is history.
After his untimely death on May 11, 1981 he left those of us who cared a body of recorded works that would have a profound effect on the followers of his faith and those of us who simply loved his music and would continue to see the brilliance of a simple man. Bob Marley’s music has been recorded by many artists before and since his passing.
Eric Clapton of course helped to bring his music to the international stage when he recorded “I Shot The Sherriff”.
There is a lot more that can be said about Bob Marley’s career and the various incarnations of his band but suffice it this is a man that has left a lasting legacy. He brought the music of Jamaica to the world and the world loved it.
Bob Marley was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1994. Time magazine chose Bob Marley & The Wailers' Exodus as the greatest album of the 20th century.
In 2001, Marley was posthumously awarded the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, and a feature-length documentary about his life, Rebel Music, won various awards at the Grammys. With contributions from Rita, the Wailers, and Marley's friends and children, it also tells much of the story in his own words.
