Who was Bob Marley, ambassador of reggae and icon of the Rastafarian faith

– How did you get started in music?
– I started crying.

After the strange comment also made to Jamaican musician Neville Willoughby, Bob Marley becomes serious and says he needs to think carefully about the question because he doesn't want to be ungrateful with “Jah”, in reference to the way members of the Rastafari movement refer to God.

Throughout the entire 1973 interview, the scheme remains: a question about some specific aspect of his career – his success, specialized magazines, music producers in Jamaica – and an answer in which, in addition to some specific information, Marley responds with reflections on God, the power of money, Jamaica, injustice and revolution.

A small sample of the character, and something that made him a legendary artist: Marley was a musician, but at the same time, he was much more than that.

Origins

Bob Marley was born on February 6, 1945 in Nine Mile, a rural community in Jamaica. Son of Norval Sinclair Marley, a white rural supervisor, and Cedella Malcolm, the black daughter of a local official, Marley grew up in this small village whose inhabitants maintained customs derived from their African ancestry. “The proverbs, fables and activities associated with rural life” contributed to his career as a composer a deeper cultural context and an aura of mysticism”, as indicated on his official website.

Although he took his surname and the family relied on his financial support, Marley's father was not part of his life since childhood. The official biography states that this was due to the paternal family's strong rejection of his marriage to his mother and to an episode – sometimes reported as a kidnapping – in which Norval took his son to Kingston, the country's capital, to live with his father. nephew and go to school, until his mother discovers he was doing neither and takes him back with her to Nine Mile. According to his web profile on the Britannica encyclopedia, the boy Marley was characterized by his shyness, his fixed gaze and his affection for reading palms.

As a teenager, Marley returned to the capital to settle in Trench Town, a housing area called that because it was built over a wastewater canal. There, while training to apprentice as a welder, he began to receive the musical influence of ska, a rhythm that had emerged from the local interpretation of American soul and R&B and was expanding commercially.

In the aforementioned interview, when Willoughby asks him again about his first steps with music, Marley finally responds: “It was in Kingston. There used to be a little place (…) where I went one night, sang a tune and made a pound. And a man told me to start singing.”

Deciding to dedicate himself to music, Marley begins to interact with other aspiring singers like him and meets some producers, until he records his first singles: “Judge Not”, “Terror” and “One More Cup of Coffee”. Faced with the lack of success, Marley was paid just 20 pounds for these songs.

Success and consecration

In the sixties, Marley founded the band The Wailers with two other friends, while taking singing, rhythm and melody lessons with the respected singer Joe Higgs. The group's first hit, “Simmer Down” – in which they warned young people to control their temper or “the battle would be tougher” – became an anthem in Kingston's marginalized neighborhoods.

The song demonstrated that it was no longer necessary to repeat the style of foreign artists, but that it was possible to write tough, uncompromising songs that reflected the feelings of the local population. In the mid-sixties, ska would change to rocksteady, a slower rhythm that would later give way to Jamaica's characteristic reggae rhythm.

Between the end of the sixties and the beginning of the seventies, The Wailers increased their popularity and prestige locally and, in 1972, by releasing “Catch a Fire”, they gave reggae a global audience.

This album took The Wailers on a successful tour of the United States and United Kingdom, after which they recorded a new album, “Burnin”, which went on sale in October 1973. This album featured some of Marley's most famous songs. , such as “Get Up, Stand Up” and “I Shot The Sheriff”, which Eric Clapton covered and took to the top of the Billboard Hot 100 list in 1974, significantly raising the international profile of the charismatic Marley.

At that time, the Jamaican had married Rita Anderson and had spent a few months in Delaware, United States, where he traveled to visit his mother's new home. Upon his return, Jamaica's situation had deteriorated due to unemployment, rationing, political violence and fiscal adjustments required by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), all of which came to shape the lyrics of the songs Marley would later write.

In fact, her career was established with songs such as “No Woman No Cry”, “Exodus”, “Could You Be Loved”, “Coming in from the Cold”, “Jamming” and “Redemption Song”, and emblematic albums such as Natty Dread (1974), Live! (1975), Rastaman Vibration (1976), Exodus (1977), Kaya (1978) and Uprising (1980).

Religion and politics

In 1976, Bob Marley was already considered a global ambassador for reggae and responsible for popularizing Rastafarian beliefs internationally. This fostered pride among his followers in Jamaica, as well as disgust among his detractors, in an increasingly divided political environment. That year, Marley survived an assassination attempt at his home in Kingston, in which some members of his close circle were injured.

In 1978, another milestone in Marley's life occurred: his first trip to Africa, where he visited Kenya and Ethiopia, the latter the spiritual home of the Rastafarians.

Rastafarianism is, according to Britannica, a political and religious movement that emerged in the 1930s in Jamaica and combines elements of Protestant Christianity, mysticism and Pan-African consciousness. Its members consider that people of African descent around the world are “exiles in Babylon” and believe that both slavery, economic injustice and racial discrimination are trials imposed by “Jah”. Furthermore, many “rastas”, as members of the movement are called, believe that the last Ethiopian emperor, Haile Selassie I, crowned in 1930, was the third reincarnation of God on earth (after Melchizedek and Jesus) to redeem all blacks.

Thus, their bond with this religion united Marley and The Wailers with the African diaspora and linked reggae to a unifying and liberating force.

Marley learned in 1977 that he had cancer in the big toe on his right foot, which had metastasized and spread throughout his body. Finally, he passed away in a Miami hospital on May 11, 1981. That year, the Government of Jamaica recognized him with the Order of Merit.

In another excerpt from the aforementioned interview, Willoughby tells Marley that he always comes back to the idea of ​​suffering. “Would you say you are a sad or angry person?” she asks.
“I see evil on Earth,” Marley responds, and adds: “It’s not anger or anything, it’s the truth, and it has to flow from man like a river.”