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Calypso is a swaying, syncopated sound that speaks of exotic tropical locales. Harry Belafonte has a hit in 1956 with ‘The Banana Boat Song (Day O)’ (US no. and Britain hear Caribbean music, it is called calypso. Perhaps the first time audiences in the U.S.A. It is almost impossible for Jamaican musicians to make a decent living from the minimum wages to which they are restricted. Crime lords are sometimes involved in the recording business as are many unscrupulous operators. When Jamaicans sing of outlaws and gangsters, it isn’t just boasting.
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These proceeds are used to create a plethora of Jamaican record labels, recording local acts that either provide original songs or sing cover versions of overseas hits. They are entrepreneurs who drive from town to town in a truck equipped with amplifiers and records, charging others a fee to hear their sounds or provide music for parties. Instead, sound system operators spring up. The native Jamaicans are fairly poor so buying records is a luxury most can’t afford. music when American troops are stationed on that island during World War Two. Jamaica is an island in the Caribbean Sea, just below Cuba. Inspired by Dekker, Bob Marley thinks he should be a recording artist too. “I was learning a trade.” One of his co-workers is Desmond Dekker, who begins carving out a recording career for himself (Years later, in 1969 Dekker will have an international hit with the song ‘The Israelites’). So it carry a heavy vibration.”īob Marley is working as a welder. And it’s a place where they used to take the slaves them, you know. Marley points out that “Well, in Trench Town now you find…all talent in Jamaica come from Trench Town. It is “1958” when Bob Marley begins to get into music himself. As far as music goes, despite “growing up in a musical family,” Marley notes, “We couldn’t afford to buy records so we listened to the radio.” ‘Cos the police get you, blame you, you go to prison…” Bob Marley attends Jamaica’s Stepney School where his friends include Winston Hubert McIntosh and Neville O’Reiley Livingstone, later to become better known as, respectively, Peter Tosh and Bunny Livingstone. The only thing you really look out for was the police. “When I livin’ in Trench Town, y’know as a young man, survivin’ it was easy. “It was lean, but I could stand it,” Marley asserts. They wind up in Trench Town, a rough, almost-lawless ghetto. When Bob Marley is 12, his father dies and his mother and he relocate to Kingston, the big city, in search of a better life. The man who create me, who cause me to come from black and white.” Despite such sentiments, Bob Marley identifies himself as an African-Jamaican. Me don’t deh pon the black man’s side, nor the white man’s side. He later says, “My father is a white and my mother black. Cedella Booker is pretty much left to raise their child alone.Īs a half-breed, Bob Marley experiences scorn from his peers. He claims to have been a Captain in the Royal Marines, but there is no evidence that he ever saw active military service or that he ever rose above the rank of Private. Norval Marley is a plantation overseer and he is routinely addressed as ‘Captain’. Bob Marley is named after his paternal uncle, Robert Marley. The boy is the son of Norval Marley, a middle-aged white Jamaican, and Cedella Booker, a teenaged African-Jamaican. “That’s in the country, a little place up the hills,” he explains. Robert Nesta Marley (6 February 1945 – ) is born in the village of Nine Mile in rural St. Marley’s quotations here are transcribed as faithfully as possible. But God protect, you know…Yeah.” He adds fatalistically, “What is to be must be.”īob Marley speaks in a thick Jamaican patois (a dialect, a provincial form of speech). The only person who thinks they know the identity of the guilty party is Bob Marley: “Well, I think it was the devil, y’know. Somebody feel like ‘Smile Jamaica’ concert shouldn’t go on, so them try to stop it.” This concert is an attempt to soothe public unrest but it is not clear which faction ordered the attack. The assassination attempt is apparently politically motivated. The singer’s manager, Don Taylor Marley’s wife, Rita and another friend all sustain wounds, but no one is killed. A bullet grazes Bob’s chest and lodges in his left forearm. It is 3 December 1976 and seven gunmen have opened fire on Island House, Marley’s headquarters. “It was about 9.00 in the night,” says Jamaican singer Bob Marley. “How long shall they kill our prophets / While we stand aside and look?” – ‘Redemption Song’ (Bob Marley)