Bob Marley-The Story Behind the Music

[Spoken Word]

During the 1970’s and 1980’s, many African Americans relished the music of Bob Marley of Jamaica (1945-1981), embraced his Rastafarian beliefs, and grew dreadlocks like those he wore. Today, Marley enjoys virtually the same heroic stature in the black Diaspora as Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela. All three men dedicated their lives to the cause of racial and social justice. King’s murder in 1968 occurred when he was most engaged in the struggle to forge workers, the poor and African Americans in a coalition against racism, poverty and war. In the decade and a half after King’s death, Marley shaped reggae music to liberate the minds of his people from neocolonial oppression. Across the Atlantic, Nelson Mandela survived twenty six years in prison before ending racial apartheid in South Africa. Marley and Mandela attracted international audiences and followers at a time when issues affecting black Americans aroused little outside interest. Moreover, Marley’s music also deepens our understanding of the birth of Hip-Hop or Rap music that emerged from the inner city neighborhoods of New York. Hip-Hop’s subsequent spread around the world signaled the internationalization of African American and helped to unite the black Diaspora. Marley was a son of the Urban Ghetto of Trench town in Kingston, Jamaica’s capital city. As a young man he became a Rastafarian, the Jamaican culture and religious movement that held the black Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia (1930-1974) to be divine and sought to win converts through reason and dialogue. By 1968 Marley was fully engage in writing and performing music that merged culture, religion, and politics in a way that invited dance, but also challenged and excited its listeners’ intellect. Especially noteworthy were Marley’s three concept albums: Survival, Uprising, and Confrontations, which brought together the themes that, framed his life and work celebrating black survival, challenging mental slavery, and constructing new visions for the future through defiance and hope. According to scholar Anthony Bogues, “one not only dances to Marley, but one has to both LISTEN to Marley since he is both singing and engaging in social criticism.” The lyrics, combined with Marley’s conversational style and use of poetry, chants, biblical imagery, and hypnotic offbeat reach across boundaries of class, race, gender, and region. In “Trench Town” on the confrontation album, Marley sang:

Up a cane to wash my dread
Upon a rock I rest my head
There I vision through the sea of oppression
Don’t make my life a prison
We came from Trench Town…
Can we free our people with music
Lord we free the people with music
We free the people with music, sweet music

After Marley’s untimely death in 1981, his musical mission was taken up to the next step by his son Ziggy Marley. Born in 1968, David Marley, nicknamed “Ziggy” by his father, grew up in Jamaica and the United States. He began playing music at an early age and formed the band Melody Makers with his three siblings shortly after his father’s death. Ziggy Marley carried on the reggae tradition but incorporated other sounds from African Diaspora, including blues rock and hip-hop. In doing so, he continues his father’s tradition of international engagement and politically informed music.

Works cited: Anthony Bogues, Black Heretics, and Black Prophets: Radical Political Intellectuals (New York: Routledge, 2003)