Reggae Healing Of The Nation

"His message was a protest against injustice, a comfort for the opressed. He stood there, performed there, his message reached there and everywhere. Today's funeral service is an international right of a native son. He was born in a humble cottage nine miles from Alexandrea in the parish of St.Ann. He lived in the western section of Kingston as a boy where he joined in the struggle of the ghetto. He learned the message of survival in his boyhood days in Kingston's west end. But it was his raw talent, unswerving discipline and sheer persiverance that transported him from just another victim of the ghetto to the top ranking superstar in the entertainment industry of the third world."

Spoken by the Jamaican President May, 1981



"IF THERE STRONG ROOTS THERE IS SWEET FRUITS"bob marley




"No Body Can Stop Reggae Because Reggae Strong"

Bob Marley was born in the small village of Saint Ann Parish, Jamaica as Nesta Robert Marley.[4] A Jamaican passport official would later swap his first and middle names.[5] His father Norval Sinclair Marley was a white Jamaican of English descent. Norval was a Marine officer and captain, as well as a plantation overseer, when he married Cedella Booker, a black Jamaican then eighteen years old.[6] Norval provided financial support for his wife and child, but seldom saw them, as he was often away on trips. In 1955, when Marley was 10 years old, his father died of a heart attack at age 60.[7] Marley suffered racial prejudice as a youth, because of his mixed racial origins and faced questions about his own racial identity throughout his life. He once reflected:

I don't have prejudice against himself. 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.

[8]

Marley became friends with Neville "Bunny" Livingston (later known as Bunny Wailer), with whom he started to play music. He left school at the age of 14 to make music with Joe Higgs, a local singer and devout Rastafari. It was at a jam session with Higgs and Livingston that Marley met Peter McIntosh (later known as Peter Tosh), who had similar musical ambitions.[9]

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,[10] attracted little attention. The songs were later re-released on the box set, Songs of Freedom, a posthumous collection of Marley's work."