To the whole world Bob Marley is a musical genius, a symbol of the Rastafari movement and philosophy and the face of reggae. While there are a handful of singers that have achieved this type of legendary status, only a small part of the general public knows about his really humble beginnings and his life before forming the Wailers. So this is exactly what we’ll talk about in this article.
Bob Marley (full name: Robert Nesta Marley) was born on February 6, 1945, in the village of Nine Mile in Saint Ann parish, Jamaica, to Cedella Booker, an Afro-Jamaican eighteen-years-old girl, and the much older Captain Norval Marley, a white man from England who used to work for the government. Cedella and Norval married the same year, but, though he provided financial support, Bob’s father was constantly absent. In fact, Bob saw him only a handful of times before Norval died from a heart attack in 1955.
Bob spend his early years in his grandparent’s house in Nine Mile, living a simple life as a country boy, without electricity, helping his family with their farming activities. When he was little, and even in later years, he was teased for his appearance and even called ‘half-caste’ because of the fact that he was born to a black mother and a white father. As a child, he attended the Stepney Primary school where he met Neville O’Riley Livingston, known as Bunny Wailer, with whom he became good friends. It was in that school that the two boys started playing music together. The boys even became stepbrothers, as Bob’s mother and Bunny’s father got together and had a daughter, Pearl.
When Bob was 12, his family moved to Trenchtown, Kingston, a place known around the world for the huge number of musicians it produced. So, even though life in the ghetto was tough and Bob went to bed hungry on numerous occasions, his new-found home turned out to be extremely valuable for his musical development. He was now exposed not only to the more traditional Calypso and Mento and the new ska music, but to the latest music that was from the American radio stations that reached Jamaica. Trenchtown is, in fact, considered to be the birthplace of ska, the famous predecessor of reggae which derived from the American R&B and soul music which the difference that the accent was put on the offbeat. Then, it also saw the development of ska into reggae music. The neighbourhood became a reoccurring theme in Bob Marley’s music and was immortalised in his hits Trench Town, Trench Town Rock and No Woman No Cry.
In this tumultuous but culturally rich environment, Bob started developing his voice and musical abilities and formed a vocal group with his stepbrother Bunny Wailer, Beverley Kelso, Peter Tosh and Junior Braithwaite. In 1959, he began hanging around and working with the already successful musician Joe Higgs who tutored the group on their vocal harmonies and taught Bob to play the guitar. The same year Bob left school and focused solely on his musical career which we’ll take a closer look at in our next articles.