Bob Marley and the Wailers

The Ultimate Illustrated History

Richie Unterberger

• Publisher: Voyageur Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780760339558, 9780760338322
• eBook ISBN: 9780760359730
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music Biographies

More than four decades after Marley’s death, he and his bandmates remain the most famous reggae artists of all time. Bob Marley and the Wailers explores their legacy.

Illustrated with photos and memorabilia from all phases of their journey, Bob Marley and the Wailers illuminates the lives and times of the man and his collaborators. Indeed, the Wailers are one of the most famous bands of all time, period. Their evolution from early-60s Jamaican ska act to international superstars was not just improbable, but unprecedented for an act from a third-world nation.

The entire, incredible journey of Marley and the Wailers is covered in this visual history. You will see the crucial role they played in establishing reggae as a globally popular form of music, and the influence that the Rastafari movement had on their lives and sound. Plus, how Marley's socially conscious lyrics and actions made him a universal symbol of pride and justice. This tribute takes you through the entire story, right up to Marley's untimely death in 1981, and his enduring legacy beyond.

1 BEGINNINGS 1945–1962

When Bob Marley was born, no one would have predicted that a boy of his background could become a musical revolutionary. His race, nationality, and modest family assets all seemed to work against the likelihood of his even rising out of poverty. Yet those same factors may well have fueled his burning desire to better not just himself, but the lot of millions of others with similar disadvantages.

One of those disadvantages was his color. Economic and political power in Jamaica was almost exclusively concentrated in a small white minority, often descendants of the British, who were still running Jamaica as a colony in which the gap between the ruling elite and a large black underclass was huge. Although his father was white, Marley was considered part of that underclass. It had been part of Jamaican life since slaves were forced to move to the country from their African homes starting in the early sixteenth century, though Jamaica finally abolished slavery in 1838.

Marley’s mother, Cedella Malcolm, was reasonably well off by the standards of rural black Jamaicans. In the village of Nine Mile in the parish of Saint Ann, her father ran small businesses and owned some property. Her family became known to Norval Marley, a Jamaican of British descent who was, by most accounts, an overseer of land administered by the government in the area, though it’s been suggested that his position was more modest than that.

A group of Jamaican musicians plays a small local dance in 1946, the year after Marley’s birth. MICHAEL OCHS ARCHIVES/GETTY IMAGES

“Judge Not” was credited to Marley when it was issued as his debut single. He was just sixteen.

Indeed, considerable mystery surrounds Norval’s origins. He was known as Captain Marley, but doesn’t seem to have attained that rank in his travels and various occupations in Jamaica, Britain, and Nigeria. When he first crossed paths with Cedella, he was aged anywhere from his late forties to his early sixties, depending on the account. Certainly the middle-aged man was quite a bit older than the teenaged girl, who was seventeen when she became pregnant by him. Conferring legitimacy on the child they were expecting, Captain Marley married Cedella in June 1944.

Although Norval moved to Kingston shortly afterward, he did name the son that Cedella gave birth to on February 6, 1945, Nesta Robert Marley. For much of his early youth, the future Bob Marley would be known as Nesta. He seldom saw his father, and when the youngster was sent to live with Norval at around the age of five, Captain Marley ended up arranging for his boy to live with a woman not even related to his parents. Cedella Marley ended up taking her son back to Nine Mile about a year later. He’d see little of his father before Norval Marley died in the mid-1950s.

“Captain did not prove himself a good father,” Cedella understated in her book, Bob Marley, My Son (written with Anthony C. Winkler). “Mostly, he stayed away from his son, writing the occasional letter but visiting only rarely. He seemed to take little or no interest in Nesta’s upbringing.”

If his mixed racial background was an embarrassment to his father’s family, and the possible source of some teasing from his peers as he grew up in black Jamaican society, Marley never let it hold him back. “My father’s white, my mother’s black,” he acknowledged in Melody Maker in 1975. “You know what them call me, half caste or wh’ever. Well, 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 man who create me, who cause me to come from black and white, who give me this talent.”

Marley’s mother, Cedella Malcolm, was from the village of Nine Mile, where her father ran small businesses and owned some property. Marley’s boyhood home there is now a museum. A MEDIA PRESS/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

Marley’s father Norval was a white Jamaican of British descent and, by most accounts, a government land administrator.

FORMING THE WAILERS

As a single mother in a small town, Cedella found it hard to support herself and her son, taking domestic work in Kingston and leaving Bob in the care of relatives in Nine Mile for spells. Shortly before Bob’s teens, the two moved to Kingston, by far the largest city in Jamaica. There she took up with Toddy Livingston, who ran a bar and often visited her and Bob in Trench Town, a large ghetto even more impoverished than its counterparts in the United States.

Here Bob became reacquainted with Livingston’s slightly younger son, Neville, known as Bunny since his birth on April 10, 1947. The pair had first become friends when Bunny and his father lived in Nine Mile several years earlier. Their friendship grew as they discovered a mutual interest in music and as their parents’ affair intensified, resulting in a daughter, Pearl, born in 1962. With a half-sister in common, Bob and Bunny were not just friends; they were family, cementing a bond that would help in the formation of their own singing group.

Marley’s former home on First Street in Trench Town as seen in 2000. COLLIN REID/AP PHOTO

Even for bright boys like Bob—a name, rather confusingly, that he was increasingly being called, along with Robert, Robbie, and Nesta—educational opportunities for the overwhelmingly black and poor population of Trench Town were limited. Around the age of fifteen, he left school with no qualifications and, apparently, little to expect in terms of economic advancement. He at least had plenty of time to sing and play rudimentary guitar with Bunny.

Their chief inspirations were not the calypso music popular in Jamaica and throughout much of the Caribbean, nor mento, its somewhat similar Jamaican variation. Their real passion was for American rock ’n’ roll and rhythm and blues, which made their way into the poorest neighborhoods of Jamaica via radio and records. As Bob confirmed in interview footage used in Rebel Music: The Bob Marley Story, “We couldn’t afford to buy records, so we listened to the radio.”

In particular, they were inspired by the young, black American harmonizing vocal groups—sometimes called doo-wop acts, in honor of the frequent nonsense syllables they employed—that were merging pop and R & B into a style that would lay a foundation for 1960s soul music. Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers had been one of the first such groups to score a big rock ’n’ roll hit in the mid-1950s with “Why Do Fools Fall in Love.” The more polished Platters updated the kind of smooth arrangements used by pre-rock acts like the Ink Spots. And the Drifters, with ever-shifting members, added more elaborate, sometimes orchestrated production as the 1950s turned into the 1960s. All were cited by Bunny Livingston (in the Marley documentary) as key early influences on the group that, with the addition of a third member, evolved into the Wailers.

The third teenager was Peter Tosh, born Winston Hubert McIntosh on October 19, 1944. Peter spent his early years in the coastal town of Savanna-la-Mar before moving at a young age to Kingston, living with an uncle in Trench Town when he entered his teens. A more accomplished instrumentalist, Tosh ran into the pair while playing and singing in Trench Town. By the early 1960s, they formed a trio, naming themselves the Teenagers, in honor of Frankie Lymon’s group. A...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Beginnings: 1945–1962
• Chapter 2: The Studio One Ska Years: 1963–1966
• Chapter 3: From Rock Steady to Reggae: 1967–1971
• Chapter 4: The International Breakthrough: 1972–1974
• Chapter 5: The First Third-World Superstar: 1975–1979
• Chapter 6: The Final Years: 1980–1981
• Epilogue: Legacy
• Selected Discography
• Bibliography
• Author and Contributors
• Index
• Dedication
• Copyright