One Stop Music
This page on One Stop Music, has an article dedicated to the early days of the legendary reggae musician Bob Marley.
Bob Marley Music - The Early Days
Going right back to the beggining, Robert "Bob" Nesta Marley was born in a small village called Nine Mile that lies in Saint Ann Parish, Jamaica on 6th February, 1945.
Bob Marley's father, Norval Sinclair Marley who was born in 1895, was a white Jamaican of English descent. His own parents came originally from Sussex, England. Norval Marley was a Marine officer and captain but it was as he took the role of plantation overseer that he married Cedella Booker. Cedella was a black Jamaican woman who was eighteen years old. Norval provided financial support for his wife and their son, but due to the fact that he was often away on naval trips, he hardly ever saw them.
It was with a terrible stroke of luck that Bob Marley was only ten years old when his father, at the age 60, died suddenly of a heart attack in 1955.
As he grew up, Bob Marley suffered great amounts of racial prejudice because of his mixed racial origins. In fact he faced many questions concerning his own racial identity practically all through his life.
He was once quoted as saying:
"I don't have prejudice against myself. My father was a white and my mother was black. Them call me half-caste or whatever. Me don't dip on nobody's side. Me don't dip on the black man's side nor the white man's side. Me dip on God's side, the one who create me and cause me to come from black and white."
The young Bob Marley and his mother were forced to move to the slums of Kingston's Trenchtown following his father's death. This was a very tough neighbourhood and Marley was forced to learn self-defense in order to counter his being the target of bullying partly because of his racial makeup and also due to his small stature - he was only five feet four inches tall. This eventually earned him a reputation for his great physical strength and with it, the nickname "Tuff Gong".
As a youth, Bob Marley became friends with Neville "Bunny" Livingston (who later became known as Bunny Wailer) and they began playing music together. He left school at the age of fourteen to work as an apprentice at a local welder's shop. In their free time Bob Marley and Bunny Livingston played music with another friend, Joe Higgs. Joe was a talented local singer as well as a devout Rastafari. Higgs is often regarded by fans as Bob Marley's mentor. It was during one of these jam sessions with both Higgs and Livingston that Bob Marley met another man with similar musical ambitions, Peter McIntosh (who later became better known as Peter Tosh).
Bob Marley recorded his first two singles in 1962. "Judge Not" and "One Cup of Coffee" were produced by Leslie Kong and were released on the Beverley's label under apseudonym of Bobby Martell. Unfortunately neither of these Bob Marley music singles attracted much attention and they flopped.
Those two songs were later re-released on the more recent albumm, "Songs of Freedom," which is the definitive posthumous collection of Bob Marley music and his songs. Of course, later releases attracted much more attention, but that is the subject for the next article on Bob Marley music.
Terry Didcott
One Stop Music