10

No Woman, No Cry

music and words by Bob Marley

THE SUMMER OF 1975 WAS relentlessly hot in the United Kingdom, the hottest since 1947. In the south of England, the temperature was exacerbated by high humidity, the nights scarcely less oppressive than the days. On 17 July, the Lyceum Theatre in London was packed to the rafters – literally so, as some people climbed onto the roof in an attempt to gain entry. The heat inside the auditorium was such that steam rising from the crowd condensed on the ceiling until it began to drop like rain. The people in the crowd being rained on were there to hear Bob Marley and the Wailers, and, although they didn’t yet know it, to participate in Marley’s most famous recording.

It’s hard to overstate the almost messianic figure the Jamaican Marley cut in 1970s London, riven, as it was, with racial tension. The following summer – which was hotter still – the Notting Hill Carnival, created as a celebration of Caribbean music and culture after the Notting Hill riots of 1958, itself ended in rioting. In 1958, it had been ‘Teddy Boys’ – white youths with dandyish clothes and violent temperaments – that had attacked black neighbourhoods. In 1976 the fighting was between black youths and the police, the latter using stop-and-search powers on a community affected by unemployment at three to four times the rate of the British population at large. The young men and women who now found themselves fighting with police were descended from a generation that had been encouraged to come to the UK in the postwar years – the so-called ‘Windrush generation’ – specifically to take jobs in a country depleted of able-bodied workers. Some of those who came had fought alongside British troops and felt themselves to be returning home. But three decades on, the jobs simply didn’t exist.

For these young people, bound together by their shared experience of racism, Bob Marley – and reggae in general – symbolised a Caribbean they had been told so much about, but in most cases, never visited. In Marley’s music, they heard a soundtrack of resistance.

On stage at the Lyceum, Marley sang songs such as ‘Burnin’ and Lootin’’, ‘Them Belly Full (but We Hungry)’ and ‘Get up, Stand Up’. And he sang a song from his more recent album, Natty Dread, that, in spite of its unusually slow tempo, the crowd quickly recognised, and immediately began singing along to. The album version of ‘No Woman, No Cry’ is up-tempo and synthetic. Driven by a drum machine, Marley doesn’t seem especially engaged. But at the Lyceum, it was different. The organ leads off, ushering us into the song almost as though we’re entering a church. A cheer goes up and, by the second line of the introduction, the audience has joined the backing singers: ‘No woman, nuh cry’. The two-line introduction repeats three times, before Marley himself begins to sing, and by now the crowd is as much a part of the song as the singer himself.

The structure of the song is almost a passacaglia, which is to say the chord structure repeats throughout, with only a slight variation. It runs through all the verses, the chords sinking from the tonic C sharp major through G sharp and A sharp minor to F sharp major (I–V–vi–IV), and it runs through the interpolated call and response: ‘Everything’s gonna be all right’. The only line that has slightly different chords (I–IV–I–V) is the tagline ‘No woman, no cry’. So the crowd has no problem becoming a 2000-voice chorus, singing mostly wordlessly under Marley.

Marley himself performs with such feeling – passionately, affectionately, even humorously – that the song is barely recognisable as the track on Natty Dread. At more than seven minutes, the performance is nearly twice as long as on the studio album, though this isn’t entirely a function of the slower tempo. Perhaps it continued as long as it did because of the audience participation; perhaps the Wailers didn’t want it to end. The following month, Chris Blackwell of Island Records, Marley’s label, wrote to the singer informing him that the recording of this performance would be a single in the UK. It was released in September, reaching number twenty-two in the British charts, with the album of the concert – simply called Live! – following in December. In 1981, on Marley’s death, it was re-released as a UK single, this time going to number eight. The live version is the definitive one – the version everyone knows.

Perhaps the lasting popularity of the song lies in the style of its performance. In contrast to the defiance and anger one hears in much of Marley’s material, ‘No Woman, No Cry’ is all consolation. The slow tempo, with its relaxed reggae beat, is better suited to the material than the original drum machine, and it allows Marley to luxuriate in his vocals. The Jamaican patois is a part of this, and Marley relishes it, the phrase ‘Observing the hypocrites’ becoming ‘Oba–oba–serving the ’eepocrits’. The crowd at the Lyceum takes the song and turns it into a community anthem that speaks of shared identity, shared struggle, pride, hope and optimism. But there is also nostalgia – you can hear the smile in Marley’s voice – which, for young black kids in 1970s Britain, must have helped yoke together a sense of community, summoning a past in a country they had never seen, yet felt they belonged to.

A sense of community is also reflected in the song’s credits. Marley ascribed its authorship to one Vincent Ford. Five years older than Marley, the Jamaican songwriter, like the singer, grew up in the poor Kingston neighbourhood of Trench Town. As a young man, Ford had both legs amputated and used a wheelchair. It seems unlikely that Ford did write the song, though it is possible he and Marley collaborated on the words, which reminisce about their shared experience sitting round a fire ‘in the government yard in Trench Town’. Marley probably gave Ford the credit, the royalties helping him run his Trench Town soup kitchen, while Marley was able to avoid any contractual obligation to his former record label, Cayman Music.

Was there a woman whom Marley told not to cry? There must have been a few. When he died at the age of thirty-six, he left behind at least eleven children, four with his wife, Rita, one that Rita had by someone else but whom Marley called his own, and six more that Marley had, each with a different mother. Still, ‘No Woman, No Cry’ is probably not about a specific woman. The comfort and reassurance he offers is to us all.