Bob Marley (born February 6, 1945, Nine Miles, St. Ann, Jamaica—died May 11, 1981, Miami, Florida, U.S.) was a Jamaican singer-songwriter whose thoughtful ongoing distillation of early ska, rock steady, and reggae musical forms blossomed in the 1970s into an electrifying rock-influenced hybrid that made him an international superstar.

Early life and career

Overview of Bob Marley's career, including footage of the One Love concert, which has been called the “Jamaican Woodstock.”

Marley—whose parents were Norval Sinclair Marley, a white rural overseer, and the former Cedella Malcolm, the Black daughter of a local custos (honored civic official)—would forever remain the unique product of parallel worlds. His poetic worldview was shaped by the countryside, his music by the tough impoverished West Kingston streets. Marley’s maternal grandfather was not just a prosperous farmer but also a bush doctor adept at the mysticism-steeped herbal healing that guaranteed respect in Jamaica’s remote hill country. As a child, Marley was known for his shy aloofness, his startling stare, and his penchant for palm reading. Virtually kidnapped by his absentee father (who had been disinherited by his own prominent family for marrying a Black woman), the preadolescent Marley was taken to live with an elderly woman in Kingston until a family friend rediscovered the boy by chance and returned him to the village of Nine Miles.

By his early teens Marley was back in West Kingston, living in government-subsidized housing in Trench Town, a desperately poor area often compared to an open sewer. In the early 1960s, while a schoolboy serving an apprenticeship as a welder (along with fellow aspiring singer Desmond Dekker), Marley was exposed to the languid jazz-inflected shuffle-beat rhythms of ska, a Jamaican amalgam of American rhythm and blues and Jamaican mento (folk-calypso) strains then catching on commercially. Marley was a fan of Fats Domino, the Moonglows, and pop singer Ricky Nelson, but, when his big chance came in 1961 to record with producer Leslie Kong, he cut “Judge Not,” a peppy ballad he had written that was derived from rural maxims learned from his grandfather. Among his other early tracks was “One Cup of Coffee” (a rendition of a 1961 hit by Texas country crooner Claude Gray), issued in 1963 in England on Chris Blackwell’s Anglo-Jamaican Island Records label.

Formation of the Wailers, role of Rastafari, and international fame

Bob Marley with the Wailers: (from left) Bunny Wailer, Marley, Carlton Barrett, Peter Tosh, and Aston (“Family Man”) Barrett.

Marley also formed a vocal group in Trench Town with friends who would later be known as Peter Tosh (original name Winston Hubert MacIntosh) and Bunny Wailer (original name Neville O’Reilly Livingston). The trio, which named itself the Wailers (because, as Marley stated, “We started out crying”), received vocal coaching by noted singer Joe Higgs. Later they were joined by vocalist Junior Braithwaite and backup singers Beverly Kelso and Cherry Green.

In December 1963 the Wailers entered Coxsone Dodd’s Studio One facilities to cut “Simmer Down,” a song by Marley that he had used to win a talent contest in Kingston. Unlike the playful mento music that drifted from the porches of local tourist hotels or the pop and rhythm and blues filtering into Jamaica from American radio stations, “Simmer Down” was an urgent anthem from the shantytown precincts of the Kingston underclass. A huge overnight smash, it played an important role in recasting the agenda for stardom in Jamaican music circles. No longer did one have to parrot the stylings of overseas entertainers; it was possible to write raw, uncompromising songs for and about disenfranchised, poverty-stricken West Indians.