The Jamaica I left behind in the fifties was not the land to which I later returned. It was not the Jamaica that Bob Marley was experiencing through the fifties and into the sixties. The rot had set in: the major flood of migration from village to town had begun and the city, especially in the west, had deteriorated.
My side of Kingston, the east side, had always seemed to me a place of gentle breeding and courtesy. We lived there tolerant of each other and aware of common needs. For in those days, perhaps because of colonialism or the advent of self-government, we seemed much more aware of the need to live in harmony. Not for me, then, the violent, divided city, riven by politics and poverty that separated us by crime and violence in armed camps.
In my time, on my side of town, we would walk the streets and acknowledge our neighbor with a smile and a greeting. House doors would remain unlocked. Church doors stayed open. No matter what your station in life, there was a certain civility that transcended class. The city was yours to roam from east to west, from north to south, from one bar to another, from one cinema to the next, whether the Majestic in the west or the Rialto in the east.
The nights as always were noisy, resounding with the barking of dogs, early-morning hours punctuated by the clip-clopping of the horse-drawn carts delivering milk and bread door-to-door. In the background sang the ever-present whistling toads. Evening was heralded by the shrill whistle of the peanut vendor’s pushcart. This was Jamaica in the fifties.
But change was in the air. Looking for work, the rural poor had flooded into Kingston, swelling the ranks of the unemployable. The city, unable to absorb or to house them, had deteriorated into rotten pockets of ghettos that festered cheek-by-jowl beside affluent residences. Bob sang about the hurt of this dispossessed horde of newcomers:
Cold ground was my bed last night
And rock was my pillow too
(“Talkin’ Blues”)
The middle class and the well-to-do had begun to abandon Jones Pen and Trench Town in the west, and Eranklin Town and Vineyard Town in the east. New middle-class neighborhoods sprang up in such outlying areas as Mona. In the locally renowned Beverly Hills, concrete mansions towered pretentiously over nearby ghettos.
In addition to these developments, the years since my departure had seen the worldwide decline of colonialism, with Jamaica rapidly moving towards Independence.
In my youthful days of hustling to make a living in Jamaica, I had been unaware of the underlying political and social tensions between people. Years later, I would always find it interesting to compare notes with Bob about our parallel lifestyles, about growing up in different parts of Jamaica during the same period. For while I was living the pain, pleasure and anguish of the Jamaican city boy, Bob Marley, also the descendant of a white man, was growing up first in the hills of St. Ann and then on the other side of the city, in West Kingston.
Whereas I knew my father and could actually approach him on his sober days, Bob never knew his. He, too, had been virtually abandoned by his mother, Cedella, who left him to be raised by his Granny Yaya and his grandfather, Omeriah.
Bob’s father, Norval, being a descendant of a supposedly respectable white Jamaican family, would not have been allowed by the social mores of the time to acknowledge his bastard child by a black country woman. The only contact Bob ever had with the Marley family, he told me, was when he visited his uncle, a lawyer on Duke Street, and tried to borrow £300 to produce a record. The uncle, one Cecil Marley, not only unceremoniously threw Bob out of his office, he also called the police.
A rural child, Bob was raised in the hills of Nine Miles in St. Ann where his grandfather, a farmer, lived a typical Jamaican peasant’s life full of hardship, but spiced with Anancy stories, folk riddles, Blackheart tales and wise African proverbs. His grandparents were able to trace their ancestry from the Coromantee slaves of the tribe of Akan, a tribe noted both for its resilience and prophetic powers.
Abandoned by his mother at an early age when she moved to Spanish Town to live with a Chinese man, Bob attended Stepney School in St. Ann. He often told me that he would never forget the day he had been sent by Granny to visit his mother at her shop. When he walked into the shop and called her, “Mama,” she brusquely challenged him, “Who yu a call Mama?” This incident left an indelible mark on him, and it was a story he often told.
In speaking of his early life Bob always emphasized that he had grown up feeling closest to Granny. She saw to his every need as a child in Nine Miles, St. Ann, a parish historically steeped in the ways of the plantocracy. For example, Brown’s Town, one of St. Ann’s main towns, boasted one of the island’s best upper-class girls’ schools, St. Hilda’s, which literally lived up to the town’s name by never admitting black girls. Bob himself had the right tint to fit into the plantocracy, but he lacked the right upbringing.
Like many other rural boys, Bob soon realized that St. Ann held nothing for him. Encouraged by his “cousin” Bunny Livingston, later known as Bunny Wailer (with whom he shared an early interest in music), Bob made up his mind to move to Kingston where his mother was now living with Bunny’s father, Thaddeus, in Trench Town.
Trench Town and the rest of West Kingston had by then become large tracts of wasteland crammed with the makeshift houses of the itinerant rural squatters who had captured every square inch of living space. Its festering shacks were built cheek-by-jowl. Unaccountably the politicians thought that the way to solve the problem of ghetto rot was simply to bulldoze the hovels and replace them with large concrete structures such as Rema and Tivoli. In Kingston, Bob ended up in one of these neighborhoods that the country would later call “Concrete Jungle.”
It was here that Bob began his association with Peter Tosh. Bunny had already joined him, and their interest in music brought the three together.
Then and now, young ghetto dwellers typically spent many idle days without regular work or opportunities. It was a world whose only escape seemed to be for boys to learn a trade or for girls to clean the houses of the rich, or for the entire family to migrate to “foreign,” usually with the mother leaving first and the family following later. For recreation, ghetto boys played cards, dominoes and had early sexual experiences. Any girl who had not borne a child by fifteen was regarded contemptuously as a mule.
The only relief from idleness and tension were the blues dances featuring the sound systems of Sir Coxsone Downbeat held at Love Lane and Beeston Street and at Cho Co Mo Lawn. Here sharply dressed youth would gyrate to the beat of Fats Domino and Louis Jordan and his Tympany Five, while blissfully inhaling the ganja that heightened their appreciation of the local kings of toasting such as King Sporty, King Stitt and Count Machub, the real forerunners of Dee Jaying, rapping and hip hop.
The only other escape was the creative talent of the individual, and with the increasing availability of the transistor radio, thousands of which were now in Jamaica, the world of music soon began to attract the sufferers and dreamers who lived in the ghettos. Bob was one of those who found music irresistible.
In this era of his life, it was to Vincent “Tata” Ford that Bob told me he turned for guidance and comfort and with whom he virtually lived. He slept in Tata’s kitchen, where he met Rita and consummated their relationship.
Over the years Bob continually expressed to me his deep love, appreciation and trust of Tata Ford, whose name he subsequently used as the writer of “No Woman No Cry,” a song set in Tata’s government yard that spoke of people Bob actually knew.
I remember when we used to sit
In a government yard in Trench Town.
Trench Town was crammed with stark concrete structures and a network of unpaved footpaths, with few trees and little or no grass. Human waste was disposed of in open pits. The night was lit by the flickering glow of kerosene lanterns and kitchen bitches. Running water was available only in the government tenement yards or through the odd standpipe. Thank God for the transistor radio which needed no electricity, and allowed an escape to the wide world of music.
As Bob said in 1975, “We used to sing in the back of Trench Town and rehearse plenty until the Drifters came ‘pon the scene, and mi group singing, so me just say, well me ‘ave fe go look a group.”
Now that Bob was living near his mother, Cedella, who had by this time become very church conscious, he was finding it increasingly difficult to deal with her. She was constantly pushing him to learn a trade as a way out of the ghetto. Bob finally agreed to enroll in school and learn welding. But he was far more interested in the music and attracted to the Rastafarian religion, which was becoming increasingly popular in Trench Town. Bob was intrigued by Rastafarianism’s haughty rejection of the material world and the injustices heaped on the people by “Babylon,” or the establishment. His differences with his mother increased, especially as he seemed to be becoming, in her eyes, an admirer of the rude boy culture that was beginning to impact on Jamaican society.
In the ghetto world the motto was dog eat dog, kill or be killed. For survival, it was necessary to fight in defense of one’s territory and rights. With the divisions between Laborite community and PNP camps widening, political grouping became increasingly important. The emerging rude boy culture echoed a new aggression and divisiveness.
Now the fire is burning...
Ride natty ride
Go deh dready, go deh
(“Ride Natty Ride”)
Their hopes and frustrations mirrored in the music that reflected the rude boy image of the time, the ghetto youth fiercely defended their home turfs. Political culture and partisanship grew and became more and more bitter throughout the Concrete Jungle. Sound system music and the Rastafarian religion competed as other important influences. The music world expanded and exploded, embracing Count P, Duke Reid and his Treasure Isle label and Clement Dodd, a cabinet maker turned DJ who hired Prince Buster and selector Lee Perry to expand the impact of his sound system.
Coxsone’s Musik City opened in 1959. Here Bob spent many hours and eventually got up enough courage to show his songs to Dodd. But as fate would have it, he ran, instead, into Leslie Kong at Federal Records, for whom he recorded his first-ever songs, “Judge Not” and “Do You Still Love Me,” for twenty pounds.
Meanwhile it was to Mortimer Planno of the Divine Theocratic Temple to whom Bob turned for guidance and explanation of the Rastafarian religion.
Planno taught Bob about the stages of Rastafarianism, taking him to the settlements deep in the interior of the country where he learned about the grounation ceremonies, and the all-night convocations of feasting on coconut meat, rice and peas (ital cooking). It was here that he listened to the traditional Bongo Man and the Humba and Nyabinghi chants, while hundreds of Rastas sat on their haunches passing the sacred chillum pipe.
The Rasta women would sir apart from the men, especially if they were menstruating—a state Rastas regard as unclean. In the Rasta religion women have a restricted role. They can’t wear make-up and perfumes. They are required to always dress modesty.
During this learning time with Planno, Bob’s spirituality manifested itself in a dream.
In his dream an old man attired in khaki appeared to Bob as an emissary of the deceased Norval Marley (Bob’s father) and presented Bob with a curious black jeweled ring. Bob told Planno that on telling his mother of this dream, she had produced the very ring in the dream and slipped it on Bob’s finger. Wearing it, Bob confided, had made him extremely uncomfortable. Planno interpreted the dream to mean that Bob would either grow in spirituality through his experiences or he would “Ketch a fire” (catch hell)—which would later be the name of one of Bob’s albums.
Welding, Bob’s grudgingly accepted trade, did not hold him for long, and soon a steel sliver in his eye forced him to quit. This accident, however, only heightened the tension between Bob and his mother. Objecting strongly to his Rastafarian leanings and his smoking of ganja, she virtually banned him from her home. He ended up sleeping in Tata’s kitchen.
In later years, Bob would lose some respect for his mother when, in the face of his rising worldwide recognition, she adopted his Rasta faith. To see her come full circle, smoking the weed and calling him Brother Bob, never sat comfortably with him, and on one occasion during a discussion of some personal business, he sarcastically remarked, “Don Taylor, you don’t know my mother.”
Following his recording of some five more songs including “One Cup of Coffee,” Bob, whose musical strength and confidence were already showing, had broken with Kong. His group had by now become known as the Wailers and was complete with the addition of two Rema girls to sing backup and Junior Braithwaite to share the vocals.
Somewhere around this time the first Wailers album, Simmer Down, done with Coxsone Dodd, was released.
Meanwhile, the political climate in Jamaica was heating up. Norman Manley’s PNP government had lost a critical referendum intended to unite Jamaica and the other Caribbean islands in a Federation. On the heels of this defeat, the JLP government of Alexander Bustamante had swept into office, taking the country into Independence on August 3, 1962.
Independence intensified the hopes and aspirations of the people, who fervently believed that their sad lives would change with the new era. The celebrations and euphoria sweeping the island further aggravated the situation. Thousands of the poor drifted into the city, hungry for rumored opportunities.
West Kingston, from which the musical Marley was emerging, had always been the center both of culture and violent political swings. Its ghetto music offered solace to the suffering poor:
One good thing about music
When it hits you, you feel no pain.
(“Trench Town Rock”)
By coincidence the political representative of the West was Edward Seaga, who was himself steeped in Jamaican music and would become the first record producer on the WIRL (West Indies Recording Limited) label, forming part of the original small body of producers that included Leslie Kong, Coxsone Dodd and Duke Reid.
A Harvard-trained anthropologist, Seaga, after receiving his degree in 1952, had proceeded to study the history and development of revivalist cults and the indigenous music forms of Kumina, Pocomania, and Obeah practices in Jamaica. In 1955, during his pre-political days, Seaga released an album of cult music on the Ethnic Folkways label and set out to develop in the ghettos of West Kingston an opportunity through music that its residents had long awaited.
Seaga moved the music into more commercial territory and from his base in Cho Co Mo Lawn began to record sessions at JBC and Federal Records. He signed such Trench Town or West Kingston groups as Joe Higgs and Roy-Wilson to the WIRL label. Out of this came the Higgs and Wilson 1959 ska track, “Manny O,’1 which sold an unprecedented thirty thousand copies. Even more startling, for the first time a producer made sure that the artiste was actually paid. Seaga then went on to sign up such additional talent as Slim Smith and Byron Lee.
Joe Higgs, himself long influenced by the Rasta faith, now brought his influence to bear on ghetto music by starting a music clinic in Rema. Using his knowledge and skill and access to the records of such stars as Nat King Cole, Billy Eckstine and Lord Kitchener, he taught his pupils—among them Bob Marley, Bunny Wailer and Peter Tosh—the rudiments of music.
Around this time Bob also met up with Danny Sims and Johnny Nash and the whole story which has become linked to Cayman Music and Sims Publishing Company was born.
It was shortly after Bunny Wailer was sent to prison for smoking ganja that Bob, having returned to St. Ann, was approached by Johnny Nash, his personal manager Danny Sims, and Arthur Jenkins, all of whom were visiting Jamaica. They persuaded Marley to sign to the US J AD (Johnny, Arthur and Danny) label.
Johnny Nash subsequently paid for Bob to go to Europe to make an album, and appear in a film scene. In the end, the album became only one single, and the scene was never shot.
Johnny Nash, however, struck gold with his cover version “Guava Jelly,” coming out of his / Can See Clearly Now album.
Bob complained about not being paid what he was due, and said, “Me don’t want to say nothing bad ‘bout them, but still me no have nothin’ much good to say.” He had learned a bitter lesson.
All that time, Bob was also recording with the Wailers for Lee Perry, producing such tracks as “Soul Rebel,” “It’s All Right,” and “Duppy Conqueror.” Working with Lee Perry on these songs, I would later learn, taught Bob all he knew about laying music. When I was producing Martha Valez’s “Disco Nights”—written by Bob for Sire Records, the independent arm of Time/ Warner—Bob hired Lee Perry to work with him. I recall Bob saying that no one was better than Lee “Scratch” Perry at laying rhythms. We did the recording at Harry J’s studios.
During this period, the political mood was turning uglier. Arnett Gardens was bulldozed by the PNP politicians to make way for a new development. Political divisions and tensions intensified as old residents were pushed out by PNP supporters brought in to create a new constituency. Concrete Jungle was created. Meanwhile, Soul Revolution, the second Wailers album, was igniting the charts.
The studios of Perry and Kong were releasing the Wailers’ tunes, but not to the liking of Bunny, Peter and Bob. The disgruntled Wailers, who knew they were being exploited, put a curse on Leslie Kong. Shortly afterwards, Kong dropped dead at thirty-eight of a heart attack. Kong had had no previous history of heart trouble. The story of Bob’s deadly curse, coupled with Planno’s interpretation of the dream and the ring, made the rounds, creating the aura of mysticism that would surround Bob all his life.
The political temperature kept rising, continuously fueled by the sounds of the ghetto. Because many of the stars in the ska scene were Rastas, a national rude boy identity began to emerge out of the music.
Seaga had by now forsaken the musical world for politics and, using his knowledge of ghetto life, delivered a major political speech as senator about the haves and the have nots. In 1954, Bustamante had appointed him to the Senate as minister of development and welfare.
The early divisiveness of the political scene with its two-party rivalries had continued to worsen, with Seaga charging that the police were hired guns for the PNP and Manley accusing Seaga of thuggery. The stage for future bloody confrontation had been set. Many would, indeed, marvel at the audacity of Seaga, a white Lebanese Jamaican, for trying to carve out a stake in the black-controlled ghettos of the west, and even winning a seat in the 1962 elections against none other than the “Burning Spear,” Dudley Thompson, who had just returned from Africa after defending Jomo Kenyatta.
The political turmoil became too much for Bob’s mother. She left for the USA and settled in Delaware. She could never understand Bob’s love for the ghetto and his unusual approach to life. To explain how he felt, Bob would often repeat Granny’s famous saying, “When the root is strong, the fruit is sweet.”
With his mother gone, Bob plunged deeper into the music world. And as new studios opened and opportunities increased, so did the impact of his music. Yet his music and the music of the ghetto still had not gained acceptance from the upper-class Jamaicans, who saw it as an insult to their culture.
One person who loved ghetto music was the innovative and creative Byron Lee, a Jamaican of Chinese descent, who had himself now joined the ranks of record producers, having acquired Seaga’s WIRL label and worked out a deal with Atlantic Records to launch ska commercially. His entry into the business coincided with Millie Small’s 1964 world hit, “My Boy Lollipop” following her arrival in England where she recorded it on the Island label owned by one Chris Blackwell. Offspring of the plantocracy, Blackwell had discovered a niche from which he could make big money.
The music itself was changing from ska to rock steady and had begun to produce such major successes as Blues Busters, Millie Small, Desmond Dekker and the Aces. The music world began to take note.
Not surprisingly it was Seaga who capitalized on the new craze and decided as minister of development and welfare to send a ska delegation to the 1964 New York World’s Fair to exploit for tourism the potential of this emerging Jamaican music. That year he also earned the respect of the Rastafarians by bringing Marcus Garvey’s body back to Jamaica.
Back on the home front, with the sound systems growing in appeal and intensity, Coxsone asked Bob to develop material for the Soulettes, Rita Marley’s group.
Born in Cuba, Rita had been brought to Jamaica as an infant by her parents, who subsequently left her behind as they migrated to England. She knew her father, Roy Anderson, was somewhere in Europe. Rita, who was then nineteen, had been raised by her strict and demanding Auntie Viola, and had already borne a child, Sharon.
Bob never really liked Auntie and would always say that she was a practitioner of obeah (Jamaican voodoo). He told me he was afraid of her. His relationship with Rita, however, developed in spite of Auntie, and they ended up living together and producing some four children during this period.
Bob’s mother Cedella never stopped trying to bring him to the USA, but he refused to go, showing little or no desire to leave the ghetto, where by now he had earned the reputation of “Gong,” a descriptive word for the toughest.
The island’s continuing economic problems, however, had not eased but worsened, heightening the attraction of the rude boy culture and its appeal to the neglected masses. Independence had not brought prosperity but only harsher poverty. Cedella continued to plead with Bob to come to the USA, finally wearing him down with the argument that his migration would help his children find a better life. In 1965 Bob at last agreed to join his mother in Delaware. To make it easier for his children to get their own visas, he married Rita.
From the start Bob never liked America and missed Jamaica. In his absence, the local music business was growing to the point that Jamaican acts were opening for such visiting stars as Betty Everett and Ben E. King. For the rest of his life Bob was always bitter that his sojourn in the USA also caused him to miss the visit to Jamaica of the Emperor, His Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie, who arrived at Palisadoes Airport on April 21, 1966. Bob had wanted very much wanted to be a part of that climactic event but had to settle for hearing about it secondhand from Rita.
This visit saw a throng of some 100,000 people turn up at the airport, exceeding even the wildest expectations. At the request of the officials, Mortimer Planno had to quiet the crowd so that His Majesty could deplane.
Bob’s stay in America was short lived. When Rita joined him in August 1966 with her daughter, Sharon, Bob promptly sent her back. And shortly afterwards, when he lost his job and learned that he was eligible to be drafted into the US Army, he left the USA and returned to where he knew he really belonged—Jamaica.