8/6/2023 0 Comments Rita marley biography book![]() In the blunt assessment of Gayle McGarrity, an academic and one of Bob’s confidantes: “They treated him like shit.” His father’s family, the so-called “white Marleys”, were even more dismissive. ![]() Marley, says Higgs, was marginalised even by his mother and “slept beneath the bottom of the house”. Joe Higgs, a gifted singer who mentored the fledgling Wailers in the arts of harmony vocals, recalls Marley being an “outcast in the house” his mother shared with her partner, the father of Bob’s fellow Wailer, Bunny Livingston. In both places he found himself pilloried as a mixed blood “red bwoi”. Abandoned by his elderly white father, an itinerant government overseer who had gotten a local teenage girl pregnant, Marley grew up first in the rural parish of St Ann, later moving to the newly built “government yards” of Trenchtown, west Kingston. Their accounts, not infrequently contradictory, are effectively marshalled by Steffens, who acts as a reliable narrator.Īmong the revelations is the extent of Marley’s deprivation in his early years. Roger Steffens, an LA reggae historian and archivist, offers a more grounded approach in this sprawling but absorbing “oral history”, drawing on interviews with 75 assorted relatives, band members, fellow travellers and lovers a lifetime’s research. Marlon James’s Booker winner, A Brief History of Seven Killings, centred on the attempted assassination of Marley in 1976, crystallises the era masterfully.Īt his HQ in Kingston, where he had “moved the ghetto uptown”, Marley regularly gave away thousands of dollars Marley’s mythos owed much to the fevered atmosphere of Jamaica in the late 1970s, when millenarian Rasta prophecy became entangled with a political feud that saw Kingston’s ghettos in near civil war amid allegations of CIA destabilisation. Marley’s story has been told many times, most notably by the late Timothy White, whose Catch a Fire, as much imaginative construct as conventional biography, best captures the mystique that swirled round the singer. For millions, he represents an irresistible mix of righteous rebellion, physical and spiritual joy (livity in Rasta speak) and, of course, musical genius. Some 36 years after his death, Marley remains a planetary icon, his image as likely to turn up at a Native American protest as on a Camden Town T-shirt. ![]() A mong biblical quotations favoured by Rastafarians comes psalm 118: “The stone that the builders refused is become the headstone of the corner”, a teaching put to song by Bob Marley on 1970’s Corner Stone, and one that neatly frames a life that began in poverty and ended in global superstardom, a rags to riches tale unparalleled in pop.
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