Bob Marley - Early Life and Career

Early Life and Career

Bob Marley was born in the village of Nine Mile in Saint Ann Parish, Jamaica as Nesta Robert Marley. A Jamaican passport official would later swap his first and middle names.. He is of Mixed Race. His father, Norval Sinclair Marley, was a White English-Jamaican of mixed English and Syrian-Jewish descent, whose family came from Sussex, England. Norval claimed to have been a captain in the Royal Marines, and was a plantation overseer, when he married Cedella Booker, an Afro-Jamaican then 18 years old. Norval provided financial support for his wife and child, but seldom saw them, as he was often away on trips. In 1955, when Bob Marley was 10 years old, his father died of a heart attack at age 70. Marley faced questions about his own racial identity throughout his life. He once reflected:

I don't have prejudice against meself. My father was a white and my mother was black. Them call me half-caste or whatever. Me don't deh pon nobody's side. Me don't deh pon the black man's side nor the white man's side. Me deh pon God's side, the one who create me and cause me to come from black and white.

Although Marley recognised his mixed ancestry, throughout his life and because of his beliefs, he self-identified as a black African, following the ideas of Pan-African leaders. Marley stated that his two biggest influences were the African-centered Marcus Garvey and Haile Selassie. A central theme in Bob Marley's message was the repatriation of black people to Zion, which in his view was Ethiopia, or more generally, Africa. In songs such as "Survival", "Babylon System", and "Blackman Redemption", Marley sings about the struggles of blacks and Africans against oppression from the West or "Babylon".

Marley met Neville Livingston (later changed to Bunny Wailer) in Nine Mile because Bob's mother had a daughter with Bunny's father, younger sister to both of them and also had a relationship with him. Marley and Livingston started to play music while he was still at school. Then Marley left Nine Miles when he was 12 with his mother to Trench Town, Kingston. While in Trench Town, he met up with Livingston again and they started to make music with Joe Higgs, a local singer and devout Rastafari. At a jam session with Higgs and Livingston, Marley met Peter McIntosh (later known as Peter Tosh), who had similar musical ambitions. In 1962, Marley recorded his first two singles, "Judge Not" and "One Cup of Coffee", with local music producer Leslie Kong. These songs, released on the Beverley's label under the pseudonym of Bobby Martell, attracted little attention. The songs were later re-released on the box set Songs of Freedom, a posthumous collection of Marley's work. Marley was also known to use an Epiphone guitar for much of his career.

Read more about this topic:  Bob Marley

Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or career:

    The shift from the perception of the child as innocent to the perception of the child as competent has greatly increased the demands on contemporary children for maturity, for participating in competitive sports, for early academic achievement, and for protecting themselves against adults who might do them harm. While children might be able to cope with any one of those demands taken singly, taken together they often exceed children’s adaptive capacity.
    David Elkind (20th century)

    One cannot be a good historian of the outward, visible world without giving some thought to the hidden, private life of ordinary people; and on the other hand one cannot be a good historian of this inner life without taking into account outward events where these are relevant. They are two orders of fact which reflect each other, which are always linked and which sometimes provoke each other.
    Victor Hugo (1802–1885)

    Work-family conflicts—the trade-offs of your money or your life, your job or your child—would not be forced upon women with such sanguine disregard if men experienced the same career stalls caused by the-buck-stops-here responsibility for children.
    Letty Cottin Pogrebin (20th century)