Bob Marley: The Untold Story

When Nesta was 11 years old, there was another accident. Playing in a stream to which his mother had forbidden him to go, he badly stubbed the big toe of his right foot, cutting it open. It was not until it became almost gangrenous that he told his mother, who then wrapped it in herbs to take down the inflammation and remove the poison. But from then on, that toe was always black.

Whilst his mother was in the capital, Nesta for a time was lodged with his aunt Amy, his mother’s sister, who lived in the hamlet of Alderton, some eight miles from Ocho Rios, on the north coast. The aunt, Rita Marley later observed, was something of a ‘slave-driver’, a strict disciplinarian even by Jamaica’s harsh standards. At five in the morning the boy would be woken up to do yard work: he would have to tie up and milk the goats and walk miles for fresh water before going to the local school, which he could see from his aunt’s house. The only respite from his chores was the friendship of his cousin Sledger, Amy’s son; the pair rebelled together against her regime, earning a reputation with Amy as troublemakers. One day Nesta’s mother received a message: Nesta had run away from his aunt’s, carrying his belongings, and made his way back to Nine Miles. In fact, he was fleeing punishment because he and Sledger had been left behind to make the Sunday ‘yard’ lunch but, clearly enthralled with their task, had then eaten up almost all of it before Amy returned from church.

However, Nesta’s mother Cedella was also a naughty girl. One Sunday evening when Cedella was about to set off back to Kingston after a weekend with her family, she got a lift in the same car as Toddy Livingston, who had returned to Nine Miles to visit some friends. It was the first extensive period of time they had spent together and there was a strong mutual attraction. On their return to Kingston they started dating and, notwithstanding Toddy’s married status, became lovers.

KINGSTON (#ulink_4538348e-246d-5d3d-be7a-568e2d72506d)

As Amy was adamant that Nesta would not be accepted back at her home, Cedella decided that it was time for her 12-year-old son to come and live with her. Accordingly, she contacted her father, who two weeks later put the boy on a bus to Kingston. This hardly displeased Nesta, who had been unhappy with his strict aunt. Although the Jamaican capital was in 1957 a very different world from the rural runnings to which the boy had become accustomed, he had at least experienced city life when his father had whisked him off there seven years previously. At the corner of Beckford Street and Charles Street, close to the terminus for buses from the country, his mother had rented an upstairs room from a property-owning family called Faulkner. Living there, however, meant a problem for Nesta’s education: there were no good schools in the neighbourhood. The difficulty was no less when Cedella and her son took short-term residence at other downtown addresses in Barrett Street, Oxford Street, and at 9 Regent Street, on one of whose corners Nesta’s mother set up another small shop.

She needed the money as there were no free schools in the area. At first, Cedella, giving the address of her brother Gibson, had enrolled her son in a school close to his home, the Ebenezer government school near Nelson Road. But the journey was a chore for the boy, who would sometimes stay with his uncle Gibson, and the daily sixpenny bus-fare was half the amount it cost to feed him every week, so Cedella made the extreme decision that she would ensure that Nesta was educated privately: she had found one school nearby, the fee-paying Model school, a small establishment on Darling Street. The weekly rates were five shillings.

Although the boy’s wry expression was beginning to cloak a sadness at the instability of his life, the teacher at his new school adored him. ‘Where’s Nesta?’ she would demand as soon as she arrived for the morning. Now reading began to come to the fore for the boy, but only when it was linked to his copious knowledge of the Bible, the one text of which most Jamaicans have an in-depth knowledge. Like a typical youth from ‘country’, Nesta showed a deeply practical nature: when, unusually, Cedella fell into a rage and beat him soundly shortly before his thirteenth birthday after he had ruined a new pair of Bata shoes by playing football in them, he paid penance to her by cleaning their home and mending a broken kitchen table while she was at work. ‘I sorry I mash up de shoes, Mamma,’ he apologised.

Although by uptown standards the school fees were inexpensive, partly a reflection of the education provided, Cedella would have to hustle and scrape to find the money needed. ‘But I never have to beg nobody or borrow from nobody. I could pay his fee, then save again to buy his shoes. I can’t remember a time when I was so badly off that I couldn’t find food for him. And he was not a child that demand this and demand that. Never have no problem with him: always obedient, would listen to me. Sometimes he get a little mad with me, but it never last fe time.’

The ‘lost’ year that Nesta had spent in Kingston had caused him subconsciously to absorb the moods and mores of the city. All the same, at first he was disoriented by being back in the capital. But he at least had the comfort of his now close friend Bunny Livingston living not too far away. With an urgent need for expression, Bunny’s soul also had music swirling away in it. Down on Russell Road, where Bunny lived with his parents, you would see Nesta with his little homemade guitar, trying to work up a tune with his friend. ‘Bob wrote little songs, and then he and Bunny would sing them,’ Cedella remembered. ‘Sometimes I’d teach him a tune like “I’m Going to Lay My Sins down at the Riverside”.’ But Bunny would note the extent to which Nesta seemed timid, withdrawn, and sensitive, as though there was always something on his mind.

Cedella, meanwhile, was becoming more and more involved with Bunny’s father, who would frequently come by and visit her. This would happen particularly when Nesta was playing and staying elsewhere, which was now not infrequent. Her son’s secondary education was becoming a problem, especially after Cedella had moved to the newish housing scheme of Trench Town and decided that the boy should return to state education – even though the schools in this downtown, impoverished area of west Kingston were worryingly rough. For a time, Cedella fell back on her previous plan, lodging her son at her brother Gibson’s home, further uptown, in order to let him qualify for that better school up by Maxfield Avenue to which he now returned. A dual purpose was served here: her brother’s girlfriend was able to care for Nesta and keep an eye on him when he came home at the end of the school day. Sometimes Cedella would pick the boy up in the evenings and take him down to Trench Town. Or if she was working in the neighbourhood, she would stay over at her brother’s. Still, it wasn’t too easy a life for either of them.

To all intents and purposes, Cedella was the mistress of Toddy, who now ran his rum bar near the bus terminal and worked on construction projects during the day, mainly on properties that he would buy, improve and sell on. Toddy employed Cedella at the bar in the daytime, paying her two pounds ten shillings a week. He was a man of a certain means, and his rising status was cemented by his purchase of a Buick Skylark; but he also garnered a reputation as something of a bad man. The quirks of Toddy’s personality, particularly his quick-tempered readiness to fight, meant that Cedella’s love affair with him was not easy. His jealousy, for example, created a tension about the couple almost from the beginning. He would only have to hear that Cedella had had a conversation with another man and he would want to come and box him down. ‘When a man is married they are always jealous of the woman they are with more than their own wife, because they know another man might come and take them. And that’s how he was handling me. I would get frustrated and upset.’

The relationship, which for Cedella began to take on the features of a classic love-hate relationship, could only worsen; many times, Nesta would come into the family house to find his mother sitting crying at the kitchen table. ‘Don’t worry, Mummy, I love you,’ he would attempt to console her, throwing his sinewy arms around her neck. He was extremely angry when, at almost 15 years of age, he saw his mother with a black eye, which Toddy had given her. ‘When I grow big, Mamma, and become a man, I goin’ lick dat man back inna him eye. You wait and see,’ he promised.

Meanwhile, Cedella would hand herself over to the Lord’s mercy: ‘I would pray and wouldn’t stop praying and asking God to take me out of that man’s hands.’

Cedella’s address was 19 Second Street, Trench Town; the area was so-called either because it had been built over a ditch that drained the city’s sewage, or because of the name of a local builder on the project, a Mr Trench. Cedella took over the downstairs one-room concrete apartment from her elder brother, Solomon, who was about to emigrate to England, quitting his job as a bus-driver. The rent was twelve shillings a month, whilst the upstairs apartments, which had two rooms, went for twenty-four shillings a month. In the evenings, Toddy was a frequent visitor, sometimes bringing Bunny with him.

Trench Town was a housing scheme built at the beginning of the 1950s, after the 1951 hurricane had destroyed the neighbourhood’s squatter camps. These squatter camps, which had gradually been filling up west Kingston, had been built around the former Kingston refuse dump, from which the countryfolk and displaced city-dwellers who lived there would scavenge for whatever they could find. In the days of the ‘plantocracy business’, the area had been a sugar plantation, owned by the Lindos, one of the twenty-one families that are said to rule Jamaica, and the ancestors of Chris Blackwell, who would some years hence play a highly significant role in the life of Nesta Robert Marley. Later, the district that became Trench Town had developed as a spacious, largely white, middle-class housing area, verdant and fertile, home to macka and plum trees. Bang in its centre, the Ambassador Theatre hosted shows by such esteemed American artists as Louis Armstrong, at which the writer and performer Noël Coward was a regular attendee. But the encroaching squatter camps caused the middle classes to depart, selling up for what they could get.

For the country ‘sufferahs’ seeking employment, the area was not without its natural resources: west Kingston once had been a simple fishing village, and the fishing beach of Greenwich Farm was only a short walk away, providing a source of nutrition or income for anyone with a hook and line. If you had the nous to lash driftwood together into a raft on which to slide out to sea along the still, warm ocean shore, so much the better. The Zen task of fishing granted those who followed that occupation an honourable, respected role in the community. It had, after all, archetypal associations as an occupation of Jesus’ disciples.

Trench Town, the core of the district, was in the hottest part of Kingston, almost untouched by the breezes from the Blue Mountains that wafted down to cool the city’s more northerly, uptown reaches. But for the slum- and shantytown-dwellers who became lodged in it, Trench Town was considered a desirable place to live; the ‘government yards’ were comprised of solidly constructed one- or two-storey concrete units built around a central courtyard that contained communal cooking facilities and a standpipe for water. Unhelpfully, Jamaica’s colonial masters had seen fit to build Trench Town without any form of sewage system.

Alton Ellis, later to become one of Jamaica’s most mellifluously beautiful – and, especially during the 1960s rock-steady era, most successful – vocalists, moved to the area as soon as the first stage of the building of the government yards had been completed: work began at Fifth Street and progressed to Seventh Street before the clearing of the ‘Dungle’ permitted the first four streets to be constructed. But there was a desperate insecurity about much of the influx of countryfolk into Kingston – those born in the city blamed them for the rise in crime figures. And Alton Ellis remembered how the entrenched lawlessness in the hearts of the shantytown dwellers soon surfaced, leading to the reputation that Trench Town developed as a haven of outlaw rejects, which later became a reality. Ellis and others, however, remembered it as initially being a ‘peaceful, loving place’. ‘When I went there,’ recalled the singer, ‘it was a new scheme, government-built for poor people.’ Each apartment within the individual complexes had one or two bedrooms, in the communal yard there would be four toilets and bathrooms, and by each gate was planted a mango or pawpaw tree. ‘But even though the place was nice,’ he said, ‘the poverty still existed. The poverty was so strong that you know what that would lead to.’

Near to Trench Town, in Jones Town, lived Ernest Ranglin, a professional jazz guitarist influenced by the likes of Charlie Christian and Django Reinhardt. Originally from a hamlet called Harry Watch in Manchester, Ranglin had been a teenage prodigy employed by prominent band leaders such as Eric Dean and Val Bennett, who from the end of the 1940s ran big, swinging dancehall bands in the American style. In Dean’s orchestra Ranglin had shared the stage with another maestro, Don Drummond, who would later be considered one of the world’s top jazz trombonists. Employed from 1958 as the staff guitar-player by JBC Radio, Ranglin was equally considered the Jamaican master of his particular instrument. Frequently, he would find himself in Trench Town, sometimes playing cricket with the local youth, including the Marley boy. ‘Really, it was still a nice area. And even the parts that weren’t, those kids didn’t notice: when you’re a child you only see the good things.’

Even before the 1951 hurricane had mashed down the zinc and packing-case residences of the shantytown, the region had a reputation as an area of outcasts. Specifically, the Trench Town environs had become one of the main homes in Kingston for the strange tribe of men known as Rastafarians, who had set up an encampment down by the Dungle in the early years of the Second World War. Although a few such men – like the trio of ‘mountain lions’, named after the Ethiopian guerrillas who swore not to cut their hair until Ethiopia was freed from Italian occupation – wore their hair long and uncombed, in the manner of Indian saddhus, most only had their faces framed by their matted beards. (It was not until the 1960s that ‘locks’ became common, partially because long hair had the effect – as it did elsewhere in that age – of unnerving the more conventionally coiffured populace. Briefly known as ‘fearlocks’, this soon mutated to the marginally less threatening ‘dreadlocks’.) These primal figures, around whom the funky aroma of marijuana seemed permanently to float like an aura, could appear as archetypal and prophetic as a West African baobab tree or like the living, terrifying personification of a duppy, that most feared of dark spirits on the Island of Springs. It all depended on your point of view and upbringing.

Mortimer Planner (whose surname commonly mutated into ‘Planno’), for example, was considered sufficiently elevated in the Rastafarian brethren to travel in 1961 to the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa to meet His Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie I, Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah; he had first moved to Trench Town in 1939. A very simple reason, he said, had drawn him there – the energy emanating from this part of Kingston: ‘Trench Town is a spiritual power point.’ Yet others in the area were not at all happy about the presence of these men with their curious belief that Haile Selassie was God. For example, a young woman called Rita Anderson, a worshipful member of the Church of God, would go out of her way to hurry across the road to avoid them; her parents had told her the truth about these people: that Rastafarians lived in the drainage gullies and carried parts of people they had murdered in their bags. No doubt it was such thinking that was the basis for the sporadic round-ups of Rastas – known at that time on the island as ‘beardmen’ – by the police, who would shove them into their trucks and cut off their locks.

In 1960, dynamite and assorted weapons were discovered at the Kingston home of Claudius Henry, a prominent Rastafarian who was a supporter of the Cuban revolutionary president Fidel Castro; Claudius Henry billed himself as the ‘Repairer of the Breach’ and had predicted repatriation to Africa would occur the previous 5 October, to this effect having sold hundreds of postcards that he claimed to be passports. The search of Henry’s home was prompted by an incident involving his son Ronald; in company with other ‘beardmen’, Ronald had shot and killed two soldiers, for which the culprits were later hanged. At the time, Prime Minister Norman Manley delivered his thoughts to the nation on followers of Rastafari: ‘These people – and I am glad that it is only a small number of them – are the wicked enemies of our country. I ask you all to report any unusual or suspicious movements you may see pertaining to the Rastafarians.’ Three years later, Rudolf Franklyn, a Rastaman who had been brutalised and imprisoned by police, took his revenge, murdering two people on the edge of the north-coast tourist town of Montego Bay. The next day, Good Friday, 12 April 1963, Norman Manley’s successor and cousin, Alexander Bustamante, sanctioned an attack by Jamaican security forces on Franklyn’s Rasta encampment in Coral Gardens, near Montego Bay; Franklyn and several associates were shot dead and across the island police beat Rastafarians and shaved off their hair.

In the twenty-first century, dreadlocks are ubiquitous in many parts of the world – though often as a fashion statement rather than as an emblem of religious belief. This would seem to be missing the point for Jamaica’s followers of Rastafari; after all, they are fully aware that, at this time of great change, humanity is living in the last days. Following the prediction of the Book of Revelation, upright dreads believe that only the righteous will move forward through the apocalypse into the new era: only 144,000 souls, those who have battled to save the world from the perpetrators of the Babylonian greed and destruction that are all around and which are endeavouring to destroy both humanity’s essential good and the environment in which positivity may flourish.

In the 1920s, the rhetorical fuel that would help bring about such fiery thinking was provided by Marcus Garvey, the colourful prophet of black self-determination. Garvey, who had been born in St Ann in 1887 and founded the United Negro Improvement Association, spoke to an audience at Madison Square Garden in New York of ‘Ethiopia, Land of our Fathers’, and proclaimed that ‘negroes’ believed in ‘the God of Ethiopia, the everlasting God’. Most significantly, he delivered a pivotal pronouncement: ‘Look to Africa, for the crowning of a Black King; He shall be the Redeemer.’ (Later, there was some debate about this: was it Garvey who said these words? For an associate of his, the Reverend James Morris Webb, the author of A Black Man Will be the Coming Universal King, Proven by Biblical History, had spoken to the same effect at a meeting in 1924.)

In 1930, rising above aristocratic in-fighting which could have overshadowed that in a Medici court, Ras Tafari Makonnen, great-grandson of King Saheka Selassie of Shoa, was crowned Emperor of Ethiopia and given the name of Haile Selassie, King of Kings, Lord of Lords, Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah. Surely this was the fulfilment of Garvey’s prophecy?

As they were elsewhere in the world, the 1930s were years of social unrest and upheaval in Jamaica. Labour unrest on the island in 1938 culminated in the vicious suppression of striking sugarcane workers on the Tate & Lyle estate at Frome in Westmoreland in the west of Jamaica. Under the orders of Tate & Lyle, the estate’s manager, a member of the Lindo family, met with six hundred plantation workers and dismissed out of hand their demands for wages of a minimum of four shillings a day, offering half that amount.

After hearing the addresses of assorted labour leaders, including Alexander Bustamante, then the leader of the new Jamaican labour movement, the workers attacked the Tate & Lyle offices and assaulted the European staff. Local police fixed bayonets and advanced on the employees: four strikers were killed, including an elderly woman who was bayoneted to death. Dozens were rounded up and jailed, including Bustamante.

Such labour and social unrest was a perfect context for the rise of a band of islanders who had divorced themselves mentally from a system in which such wrongs could be perpetrated. Though often cast as a religion of the dispossessed, there is an element of condescension in such an assessment of Jamaica’s early followers of Rastafarianism. Denied is the intellectual, even existential, acuity and rigour of so many practitioners of the religion: the depth of biblical and historical knowledge displayed at a Rastafarian reasoning is impressive, as is the mental agility to perceive every semantic subtlety of the arguments propagated. The myriad contradictions that litter Rastafari assume the status of numinous truths when one recalls Carl Jung’s assertion that ‘all great truths must end in paradox.’

In the hills of eastern Jamaica, in the parish of St Thomas, which is traditionally associated with such mystical – and specifically Jamaican – strands of Christianity as kumina, pocomania, and revivalism, Rastafarian encampments sprang up; here a life of ascetism and artistry became the armour of the religion’s followers against Babylon. To the west, Leonard Howell, one of the island’s chief propagators of the religion, also known as ‘the Gong’, founded the Pinnacle encampment in an abandoned hilltop estate between Kingston and Spanish Town, conveniently, when it came to growing plantations of marijuana, out of sight of the authorities. Eventually taking thirteen wives, Howell finally decided that it was not Haile Selassie who was Jah but himself. After his mountain eyrie was raided by police in 1954, he was thrown into a home for the mentally ill, and Pinnacle was closed down. The dreads from it spilled into the ghettoes of west Kingston. Shortly before and after independence in 1962, the violent incidents between Rastas and the police made headlines in the Daily Gleaner, but the number of His Majesty’s followers involved in such affairs was infinitesimal compared to the way the movement was burning its thoughts with the speed of a bush-fire into the popular psyche of Jamaica.

But it took the unceasing efforts of one man, who had come up in Kingston hearing the stream-of-consciousness orations of dreads in Back-a-Wall and the Dungle, to popularise and make universally known the apparently crazy idea that the emperor of Ethiopia could be the living deity.

That man, of course, was Bob Marley, who came to be seen as the personification of Rastafari. Without Bob Marley most of the world would never have learned of Jah Rastafari, or entered into any debate whatsoever about the possible divinity of Haile Selassie. In Jamaica, the image of His Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie I, King of Kings, Conquering Lion of Judah is inescapable, accompanied as it invariably is by a soundtrack of the addictive hymns of praise to His divinity that make up most of the material of roots and conscious reggae – a music whose father, to all intents and purposes, was the fatherless Bob Marley, a man who never wrote an indifferent song and who united masses around the globe. Many of his brethren in the faith felt that this was the entire purpose of the blessing of the man’s talent. Many others, however, believed that Bob was capable of this task because of his spiritual closeness to His Majesty himself, on whose right-hand side he was more than adequately fitted to sit.

As yet, young Nesta Marley knew almost nothing about the Rastas’ religion. He was simply getting through his schooldays, in a more perfunctory manner than perhaps his hardworking mother realised, anxious to get out into some form of adult life. However, his mother had moved him yet again: to St Aloysius Boys School, located at 74–6 Duke Street, on the corner of Sutton Street and Duke Street, run by Catholic sisters. Bob never really adapted to St Aloysius: ultimately, he would come to understand he had had almost no secondary education. With no permanent male role model to act as a guide, the transition from childhood to adolescence was even more awkward for him than for most teenagers. And in the evenings, his mother would not be around. On the corner of Beeston Street and Spanish Town Road, Cedella had started up a ‘cold-supper shop’, as they are known in Jamaica – curiously, as the food cold-supper shops offer is generally hot, fried, or cooked in a pot, sold next to the bottles of Red Stripe and rum that also characterise such institutions. Late one afternoon, whilst Cedella was working at her business, a rough-looking youth appeared in her shop. ‘Lady, you have a son named Nesta?’ he demanded. When Cedella asked why he wanted to know, the youth replied that Nesta had got a ‘chop over his eye’. Worried, she went to search for her son, but he ran off when she caught a glimpse of him down by his school. When he eventually came up to see his mother at her shop, Nesta had a Band-Aid plastered above his eye. One of his friends, he said, had thrown a stone and caught his face, an everyday cause of blindness in developing countries. Nesta had run off when he’d seen his mother by the school, he said, in case she might have called the police on his friend.

There would be few more opportunities for such after-school pranks. When he was 15, Nesta came home one day from school carrying a large pile of textbooks. Cedella asked him why. The headteacher, he told his mother, had closed down the school and returned to live in the country. Although startled by the news, Cedella knew there was only one response: to get her son working, preferably at a trade. She was used to the sound of Nesta rehearsing music with his friends – specifically, Bunny Livingston and a friend from the neighbourhood, Desmond (Dekker) Dacre – but she had little faith that this would secure his future. By now, Cedella had bought a small restaurant, putting her sister Rose in charge of it. But one day Nesta came home and told his mother that the restaurant had been broken into and all its contents stolen. The boy and his mother decided to sleep the night in the premises in order that it be protected from further attacks, but left and went home after a friend pointed out that if the thieves returned they would almost certainly kill anyone they found there. Soon Cedella sold it to her brother John, who resolved the problem of night-time break-ins by turning the property into a twenty-four-hour business.

For Cedella’s son there were too many unanswered questions, not the least those surrounding his parenthood. Why did he never see his father? Why had he been cursed with light skin, a clear indication of white blood flowing in his veins? It was a weapon for other youth when they wanted to taunt him for something. So much moving around from place to place, from home to home … As Nesta roamed Kingston, often playing truant, he would sometimes find himself in the area he spent time in during that year in the capital when he thought he had lost his mother for ever; and at those times he would feel an inexplicable chill run through him. Within him was a gnawing sense of unease, a fear of opening himself to others. He was no stranger to a feeling of tears of frustration and anger welling in his eyes. No wonder he veered between an appearance of shy timidity and that pure screwface mask that was the habitual shield of the ghetto youth. As he grew older, he often seemed to wear a permanent frown.

In Jamaica in the late 1950s, there was an undercurrent that suggested everything was up for grabs. People were redefining themselves, working out who they were with a new confidence. The increasingly uncertain, guilty and repressive hold of the British colonialists was about to be shaken off. Already there were whispers of independence being granted to the island, as, in the wake of the Second World War, it had begun to be around the world. New times were coming.

This sense of optimism was reflected in the music. Jamaicans had developed a taste for American R’n’B when US troops were based there during the Second World War. During the late 1940s, a number of big bands were formed – those of Eric Dean, who had employed both Don Drummond and Ernest Ranglin, and Val Bennett, for example. Jitterbugging audiences would dance until dawn to tunes they drew from American artists such as Count Basie, Duke Ellington, and Glenn Miller.

By 1950, in the USA the big bands were being superseded by newer outfits: the feisty, optimistic new sounds of bop and rhythm and blues. In Jamaica, these new American popular-music forms were absorbed but in each case given a unique, local, stylistic twist.

There had always been a large traffic of Jamaicans to the United States, a country ever eager – as the United Kingdom was – for fresh supplies of manual workers to undertake the jobs disdained by its more successful citizens. Ambitious, musically inclined Jamaicans would return from the USA with piles of the hottest, most underground 78s; to conceal the tunes’ identities, the labels would be scratched off before they were used by sound systems. Sound systems were like portable discos for giants: they would consist of up to thirty or forty speakers, each as large as wardrobes, joined by a vast, intricate pattern of cables that seemed an organic growth from Jamaica’s profusion of dangling liana vines. Music, which would sporadically and often eccentrically be commented on by the disc jockeys spinning the records, would thud out of them at a spine-shaking volume.

The sound-system dances took over Jamaica. Few people owned radios, and the only way to hear the latest rhythm and blues was to go to the big outdoor dances held at ‘lawns’ in locations such as Chocomo on Wellington Street and Jubilee on King Street. Setting up in 1950, Tom the Great Sebastian was the first significant sound-system operator. He would ‘toast’ as a DJ on the microphone, also using Duke Vin (who in 1956 began the first ‘system’ in the United Kingdom) and Count Machuki, another legendary figure from the days of sound systems. Many believe Tom the Great Sebastian was the all-time giant of sound systems. ‘He is the man,’ said Prince Buster, who later ran his own system and became one of Jamaica’s most innovative musicians. Goodies, Count Smith the Blues Blaster, Count Joe, and Sir Nick the Champ, among the leading contenders, never triumphed over Tom the Great Sebastian, as would be apparent at the dances billed as sound-system battles in which two or more systems would compete, each playing a record in turn. Tom would mash up the opposition with the uniqueness of his tunes, straight off the plane from the USA, and with the originality of his DJing and the sheer power of his equipment.

Although there was a clear ironical purpose in the taking up of aristocratic titles, it was also the only way non-white Jamaicans could possibly hope to aspire to such dizzy heights. Duke Reid the Trojan was also named after the Bedford Trojan truck he used to transport his equipment – the money for it came from the liquor stores owned by his family, an empire that began when his wife won the national lottery.

Reid, who had formerly been a policeman, was a contentious figure. Sporting a pair of revolvers in his belt, from which he would indiscriminately loose off shots, he was more inclined to destroy the opposition through violence than talent. To Duke Reid, who began operating a couple of years after Tom the Great Sebastian, may be attributed the genesis of much of the gangland-like behaviour that became a later feature of the Jamaican music business. Instead of mashing up the sound-system opposition by playing the heaviest, loudest tunes, he would simply charge into opposition dances with his gang, beating up people or stabbing them and destroying their equipment. And if that didn’t work, Reid was always partial to resorting to a spot of obeah. Undoubtedly a colourful character, at dances Reid would even have gangs of tough, sexy women, controlled by a female lieutenant called Duddah, all dressed in the same uniforms. But he also had tons of boxes, tons of house of joy, as sound-system speakers were sometimes known.

Soon, however, there came a contender for Duke Reid’s crown: the Sir Coxsone Downbeat sound system, which took its name from the Yorkshire cricketer Coxsone and was run by one Clement Seymour Dodd. Dodd had first earned his spurs as one of Reid’s myriad helpers and his family was also in the liquor-store business. King Stitt and Machuki, two of Dodd’s principal DJs, built the set; ‘Brand-new – dig, daddy’ was one of their great catchphrases. Another of the leading disc jockeys employed by Coxsone, as he became known, was Prince Buster, whose former occupation of boxer also ensured he was a sizable deterrent to the thugs run by Reid.

Although not always. By 1958, Prince Buster was running his open sound system; Reid and fifteen of his thugs went to a dance at the Chocomo Lawn on Wellington Street looking for him. Buster wasn’t there: he was playing dice down on Charles Street. Hearing that Reid and his gang were up at Chocomo, Prince Buster hurried up there, and a man immediately pulled a knife on him. In the mêlée that followed, another of Reid’s hoods split the back of Buster’s skull open with a rock. Later, he and Reid became good friends: ‘He became a nice man: he was just possessed by what was going on.’

Soon both Coxsone and Duke Reid began recording songs by local artists specifically for use on their respective systems. The law of supply and demand showed itself to be inescapable, and out of this – as well as Coxsone’s realisation that American record companies such as Imperial and Modern didn’t seem to notice when he blatantly pirated their material – was born the Jamaican recording industry.

The first two dances at which the Sir Coxsone Downbeat sound system played were in Trench Town; and the first of these was an event put on by Jimmy Tucker, a leading Jamaican vocalist.

The cauldron of Trench Town epitomised one of the great cultural truths about Jamaica – and other impoverished countries in the Third World, come to that: how those who have nothing – and therefore nothing to lose – have no fear of expressing their God-given talents. People whose earning potential sometimes seems to be literally nil have a pride and confidence in their innate abilities in arts and crafts – a pride and confidence that western educational and employment systems appear to conspire to kick out of those who pass through them. The pace of life in Jamaica, moreover, often seems to accord with the God-given rhythms of nature: rising with the sun, people are active early in the day until the sun goes down. Such a harnessing of man’s soul to the day’s natural process seems to allow free rein and progress to the creative forces that dance out from both the personal and collective unconscious.

Nesta Robert Marley would rise in the cool of first daylight, but long after sunset he could still be found, with or without his spar, Bunny, strumming his sardine-can guitar and trying out melodies and harmonies. Apart from football, it was his only solace, the only space where he could feel comfortable within his head. Later in life he would say, ‘Sleep is for fools.’

Often he would feel alienated and ostracised in the city. With his mixed-race origins clearly visible in his facial skin, he was considered a white boy and was taunted for this; his complexion could bring out the worst in people: after all, why was this boy from ‘country’ living down in the ghetto and not uptown with all the other lightskin people? Being so consistently and miserably tested can bring the worst out in someone, destroying them; or it can assiduously and resolutely build their character. Such daily bullying ultimately created in Nesta his iron will, his overpowering self-confidence and self-esteem.

‘Sometimes he’d come across the resistance of being half-caste,’ said Rita Marley. ‘There was a problem with his counterparts: having come through this white father caused such difficulties that he’s want to kill himself and thinking, “Why am I this person? Why is my father white and not black like everybody else? What did I do wrong?”

‘He was lost in that: not being able to have anyone to say, “It’s not your fault, or that there’s nothing wrong in being like you are.” But that was the atmosphere he came up in that Trench Town environment where everybody is rough. He had to show them that although he didn’t know his father, at least he knew there was a God and he knew what he was feeling.