Bob Marley Born: Reggae's Prophet Takes His First Breath

Bob Marley was born in Nine Mile, Saint Ann Parish, Jamaica on February 6, 1945, to Norval Marley, a white plantation overseer of English descent, and Cedella Booker, a Black teenager. He was mixed-race in a country where that made him an outsider twice over, too light for the village and too dark for his father's family. Norval abandoned the family when Bob was young and died when Bob was ten. They had barely met. Marley moved to Trenchtown, Kingston's most famous slum, as a teenager. He formed The Wailers with Bunny Wailer and Peter Tosh in 1963. Their early music was ska and rocksteady; the shift to reggae came in the late 1960s, driven partly by the influence of Rastafarianism, which Marley embraced as both a spiritual practice and a political identity. His international breakthrough came with the 1973 album Catch a Fire, produced by Chris Blackwell at Island Records. Blackwell marketed The Wailers to rock audiences, and it worked. Exodus, released in 1977, was later named Time magazine's album of the century. He survived an assassination attempt in December 1976, two days before a concert he'd organized to ease political tensions in Jamaica. Gunmen entered his home and shot him, his wife Rita, and his manager. He played the concert anyway, showing the audience his bandaged arm. He contracted melanoma under his toenail, discovered during a football injury in 1977. Doctors recommended amputation. He refused on religious grounds, as Rastafarian belief prohibits the removal of body parts. By the time he agreed to treatment in 1980, the cancer had spread to his brain, lungs, liver, and stomach. He died on May 11, 1981, at Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in Miami. He was 36. He had sold more than 75 million records. He had turned Rastafarianism from a Jamaican subculture into a global spiritual movement. "No Woman, No Cry" was credited to Vincent Ford, a friend who ran a soup kitchen in Trenchtown, so the royalties would support the community. Marley wrote it.