Robert Nesta Marley

Forthcoming in Encyclopedia of the World’s Minorities,

ed. Carl Skutsch, Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers

Essay

Bob Marley was a pioneer of reggae, a Jamaican-born form of popular music, and the first popular musician from a developing country to become a success on an international scale. M. was also a spokesperson, activist, and symbol for the Rastafarian religion, Black independence, and peace in Jamaica and beyond. M. left musical, political, and spiritual legacies whose influences are still felt today.

Born in the country but raised in Trenchtown, a shantytown slum of Kingston named for its sewer, M. grew up in a Jamaica that, until 1962, was under British colonial rule, beginning with the British takeover from the Spanish in 1670. British rule (and even the earlier Spanish tenure) had been harsh; the plantation system in Jamaica was among the worst in the Caribbean, and economic and social repression under the crown continued until independence (and after, under neocolonial rule). As the product of the short marriage of a teenager and a middle-aged officer in the West Indian arm of the British Army, M. could be said to embody his country’s colonial inheritance. Alongside the history of colonial oppression, however, Jamaica also had a long history of resistance. Rebellions in the 17^th, 8^th and 19^th centuries, such as the nearly eighty year long resistance by a group of ex-slaves called the Maroons, helped force the end of slavery in the British colonies and brought a measure of reform to the white-planter dominated economy. The Pan-Africanist movements of the Jamaican-born Marcus Garvey and the Rastafarians fought for rights and freedom for the poor of Jamaica.

M.’s music comes out of these two strands of Jamaican history. When M. first emerged from Trenchtown in the early ‘60s, the music he played with his first band (with Bunny Livingston and Peter Tosh, and later known as the Wailing Wailers) was an early form of reggae called ska, a music that resulted from the combination of local musical styles and American rhythm and blues (mostly picked up from New Orleans radio stations). While some of their early recordings were pop, dance music, their first minor hit, 1963’s “Simmer Down,” was about local toughs, and betrayed a nascent interest in turning popular music to political subjects. Under greater influence from American music, particularly bebop and then soul and rock, and from local folk traditions, the music evolved into rocksteady and then reggae proper, without the horns and slower beat of ska, and with scratching rhythm guitar, foregrounded bass guitar, one-drop drumming, and rougher vocals. Under the influence of Rastafarianism, to which M. converted from Christianity in 1967, M. became the preeminent artist of this “roots reggae.” Rastafarian beliefs—in the spiritual powers of marijuana, in the presence on earth of God, in the form of Haile Selassie, King of Ethiopia, and in a Pan-Africanist, Black Power political philosophy—influenced reggae immeasurably. The spirituality of reggae, sometimes good-times, sometimes mystical, and sometimes militant, made for music that celebrated good feeling and godliness and condemned injustice. M.’s music, developing all of these aspects of reggae, eventually received the notice of the music world outside of Jamaica.

During the early and mid ‘70s the Wailers ventured out into what Rastafarians call “Babylon,” which denotes the corrupt material world but also refers to the White, Western world (as in the title of their live album recorded in Paris, 1978’s Babylon by Bus). They received European and American airplay, followed by record sales, tours with major American acts, and even a cover version of “I Shot the Sheriff” by English rock guitarist Eric Clapton. On the heels of this success, after their first big American hit (1975’s “No Woman No Cry ), Tosh and Livingston left the band, and M.’s music and behavior as a public figure grew more political. The Jamaican ruling class was already alarmed upon the 1974 release of Burnin’, as much at the liner and cover pictures of M. and others, hair in dreadlocks, smoking marijuana, as at the Black Power message of songs such as “Get Up, Stand Up” and “Burnin’ and Lootin’” (and of course “I Shot the Sheriff”). The recognition awarded M. made him the face of Jamaica, and they did not want that particular dreadlocked image representing them. Things got worse when M. became involved in national politics, particularly in the divisive and violent 1976 election campaign between Prime Minister Michael Manley and Edward Seaga. His ties to Manley led to an assassination attempt in December of that year.

M.’s prominence also led to his being asked to perform, upon his return to Jamaica after a long exile and convalescence, in the “One Love Peace Concert” of 1978. The concert, ostensibly organized to raise money for charity, was meant to keep the country’s recently violent internal tensions from erupting into conflict on a massive scale. It ended with Marley persuading Manley and Seaga to join hands with him on stage as his band played. Police and military abuses continued, and opposition remained, but there was no coup and no civil war.

M. died in 1981, from a cancer that his Rastafarian beliefs would not allow him to treat, and was mourned by Jamaica and the world. Just prior to his death, M. was awarded the Jamaican Order of Merit, and upon his death was given a state funeral. M.’s legacies to the developing world—his calls for equality and justice, his condemnations of greed and oppression—are matched by those he left to the whole world. Jamaican reggae has undergone a series of rejections and embraces of M.’s musical legacy, turning to dancehall rapping or toasting, and to DJs, and while the influence on European and American music, such as the embrace of reggae by punk bands like the Clash, has waxed and waned. But M.’s larger international influences—the messages of love that are an inextricable part of his politics, the expressed hope for unity of the formerly colonized and formerly colonizing—have endured.

Biography

Born in Rhoden Hall, Jamaica, 6 February, 1945. Studied at Stepney School, St. Ann’s, Jamaica; Model Private School, Kingston, Jamaica. Apprenticed as a welder; owned music publishing, recording, and licensing companies. Awarded Jamaican Order of Merit, April 1981. Died in Miami, Florida, 11 May, 1981,

Selected Works

Catch a Fire (1972)

Burnin' (1973)

Natty Dread (1975)

Live (1975)

Rastaman Vibrations (1976)

Exodus (1977)

Babylon by Bus (1978)

Kaya (1978)

Uprising (1980)

Biography

Further Reading