Bob Marley: The Untold Story

‘Bob had to put up with a lot of resistance. If he wasn’t that strong in himself he wouldn’t be what he became. He would be downtrodden and seen as another half-caste who would never make it.’

The still air of Trench Town was barely ever disturbed by traffic noise; from those rare yards that had a tenant sufficiently fortunate to possess a radio would sail the favourite new songs from the United States, fading in and out as they drifted down the Caribbean from New Orleans or Miami, or Nashville, the home of the enormously powerful Radio WALC. Especially popular was the ten-to-midnight show sponsored by White Rose Petroleum Jelly whose DJ was Hugh Jarrett, a vocalist with Elvis Presley’s Jordanaires backing group, who were in need of employment in 1958 when Elvis went into the army. Enormously powerful, WALC could easily be tuned into throughout the US eastern seaboard and far further south into the Caribbean than Jamaica.

Nat King Cole, Billy Eckstine, Fats Domino, Brook Benton, Larry Williams, Louis Jordan and white iconoclasts such as Elvis Presley and the milder Ricky Nelson all made a strong impression on Nesta; he also absorbed the omnipresent Trinidadian calypso and steel-band music that had been adopted by Jamaica almost as its own.

It was in Trench Town that Nesta Robert Marley was exposed for the first time to bebop and modern jazz – at first, however, ‘mi couldn’t understand it,’ Bob later admitted. But in 1960, he began to take part in the evening music sessions held in his Third Street yard by Joe Higgs – and Joe Higgs loved jazz, especially hornsmen. He was one of the area’s most famous residents, due to his role as one of Jamaica’s first indigenous recording artists, as part of the Higgs and Wilson duo.

Joe Higgs, who had been born in 1940, had begun ‘foolin’ around on a guitar’ in 1956, when he was 16. Perhaps pertinently, the guitar had belonged to a Rastaman. ‘He used to allow me to play and I used to pick. I tried to combine notes in a freak manner ’cause I was just aware of harmony structure. I couldn’t tell whether this was G or F or whatever on the guitar. I know that I was just forming and building songs. Then I’d take my time and make songs around those chords. That’s the way I made most of my music.’

Another singer, Roy Wilson, lived on the same Trench Town street; they each used the rehearsal studio at Bim and Bam. Due to simple expediency, they ended up singing together as a duo at a talent contest, in which they came second. Higgs and Wilson, as they had become, were signed up by Edward Seaga, who later became Prime Minister, his only act at the time. Their first release in 1960 on his West Indies Records label (WIRL) was ‘Oh Manny Oh’; this jumping boogie raced up the Jamaican charts from 43 to 3 before hitting the top spot for two weeks. ‘Sold a lot!’ said Joe Higgs. Their biggest record, however, was ‘There’s a Reward’, recorded for Coxsone Dodd on his Wincox label. But when Higgs went to see Coxsone and asked for royalties, the sound-system boss took out a gun and beat his artist with it.

Joe Higgs was as conscious in his actions as in his lyrics; these included the unmentionable, radical subject of Rastafari – for publicly espousing the faith, which grew by quantum leaps amongst the ghetto sufferahs, he had been beaten up by the police and imprisoned during political riots in Trench Town in May 1959. This only strengthened him in his resolve. Higgs had himself learned music from his mother, who sang in a church choir; recalling how fortified he had been by the spiritual aspect of her teaching, Joe Higgs henceforth paid great attention to playing the part of both musical and moral tutor to those youth of the area with the ears to hear. The musical seminars he conducted could be rigorous affairs: especial attention would be paid to breath control and melody, and as well as guitar lessons in which he would instruct his students in the art of writing lyrics that would carry clear ideas to the people. It was not all work: sometimes entire classes would voyage together the short distance to the end of Marcus Garvey Drive to swim at the beach known as Hot and Cold, an effect created on the water by an electrical power generator.

It was in Higgs’s yard that Nesta had his first encounter with something that stilled his thoughts sufficiently for him to empathise with the lateral processes of jazz: the Jamaican natural resource with which he was later to become inextricably associated in the public mind. ‘After a while I smoke some ganja, some herb, and get to understand it. Mi try to get into de mood whar de moon is blue and see de feelin’ expressed. Joe Higgs ’elped me understands that music. ’E taught mi many t’ings.’

Another of the male role models who appeared consistently through the course of the fatherless Nesta’s life, Joe Higgs assiduously coached the 15-year-old and his spar Bunny in the art of harmonising and he advised Bob to sing all the time, to strengthen his voice. At one of these sessions Bob and Bunny met Peter McIntosh, another youth wanting to try out as a vocalist, who lived in nearby West Road.

Unlike the more humble Bunny, this tall, gangly and arrogant youth was older than Bob. He had been born Winston Hubert McIntosh on 19 October 1944 in the west of Jamaica, in the coastal hamlet of Bluefields, Westmoreland, to Alvera Coke and James McIntosh. His father had left his mother soon after the child was born. Taken into the care of an aunt, the first sixteen years of his life had been spent first in the pleasant coastal town of Savanna-la-Mar and then the rough section of west Kingston called Denham Town. In 1956, after his aunt died, he moved in with an uncle who lived in Trench Town. Lonely and isolated, the boy was consumed with an urgent need to make it as a musician. Unlike Bob and Bunny, however, whose guitar-playing had only developed perfunctorily as they concentrated on their vocal skills, Peter McIntosh was a competent guitarist, owning his own cheap acoustic model. As a boy he had piano lessons for two years, until his mother could no longer afford them.

Nesta and Bunny first encountered Peter when they literally walked into him as he rounded a Trench Town corner while he was playing his guitar and singing. Peter was especially fond of Stan Jones’s much covered country-cowboy song ‘(Ghost) Riders in the Sky’, with its ‘yippey yi-yay’ chorus, a simultaneous hit in 1949 for three separate artists, Burl Ives, Bing Crosby, and Vaughn Monroe – apocryphally, it was ‘(Ghost) Riders in the Sky’ he was singing when he bumped into Nesta and Bunny. Falling into conversation with this relative newcomer to the area, they learned that Peter already had plenty of songs he had written: he had decided much earlier that his course of life would be as a singer. Peter had learned to play the guitar by observing a bushman in Savanna-la-Mar, who would play his instrument by the roadside or on the seashore. Every day, Peter would study the man’s hands and watch where he placed them. After some time, he asked the bushman to hand him the guitar. He proceeded to perform a perfect rendition of a song the man had himself been playing. ‘Who taught you to play like that?’ asked the bushman. ‘You did,’ replied Peter. It was the older boy’s skill on the instrument that inspired Nesta to pay serious attention to mastering the guitar. After a while he was thwarted in any further progress. Peter’s battered instrument simply fell to pieces.

Another older friend of Nesta’s in Trench Town was Vincent Ford, also known as Jack Tartar or, more usually, simply Tartar, which may also be spelled ‘Tata’. Tartar had first come across the Marley boy when he was around 13 and Tartar was 17. A close bond had developed between the two: Tartar had worked as a chef at the Boys Town school, and then started up a little kitchen in his yard on First Street, which he and Nesta would refer to as ‘the casbah’. As well as the ganja that fulfilled a crucial gap in the desperate economy of Trench Town, Tartar would sell dishes like calaloo and dumplings – at times when Nesta was entirely impoverished it would be at Tartar’s that he would find free food. When Nesta made the decision to apply himself to the guitar, it was Tartar who would stay up all night with him, turning the ‘leaves’ of the Teach Yourself Guitar book Nesta had bought as he strummed the chords, peering at the diagrams of where to put his fingers in the light of a flickering oil lamp. In the mornings, their nostrils would be black from the lamp’s fumes.

One day in her bar, Cedella found herself talking to a customer who told her of a welding business on South Camp Road that regularly took in apprentices. The next day Nesta secured himself a position there as an apprentice welder – when he started work as a trainee at the South Camp Road premises he discovered that his friend Desmond Dekker was already employed there: having already passed all his exams, Dekker now was beginning to learn underwater welding.

‘I knew men who were doing welding for a livin’, and I suggested that he go down to the shop and make himself an apprentice,’ remembered Cedella. ‘He hated it. One day he was welding some steel and a piece of metal flew off and got stuck right in the white of his eye, and he had to go to the hospital to have it taken out. It caused him terrible pain; it even hurt for him to cry.’ Peter Tosh was similarly employed, having been pushed into learning welding by his uncle; he was working at another firm, but Bob’s accident gave Peter the excuse to back out of the trade.

That rogue sliver of metal that caused such agony to Nesta’s eye had a greater significance. From now on, he told Tartar, there would be no more welding: only the guitar. Bob convinced his mother he could make a better living singing. By now, Bunny also had made a ghetto guitar, similar to the ones Nesta constructed, from a bamboo staff, electric cable wire, and a large sardine can. Then Peter Tosh, as the McIntosh boy was more readily known, brought along his battered acoustic guitar to play with them. ‘1961,’ remembered Peter Tosh, ‘the group came together.’

At the urging of Joe Higgs, they formed into a musical unit, coached by Higgs: the Teenagers contained the three youths, as well as a strong local singer called Junior Braithwaite. ‘It was kinda difficult,’ said Joe Higgs later, ‘to get the group precise – and their sound – and to get the harmony structures. It took a couple years to get that perfect. I wanted each person to be a leader in his own right. I wanted them to be able to wail in their own rights.’

Nesta Marley, Bunny Livingston, and Peter Tosh were the only singers that Joe Higgs rehearsed in that manner. Although they would be beaten to this by the Maytals, who began performing in 1962, they were one of the first groups in Jamaica who were more than a duo; previously the island’s charts had been dominated by pairs of singers – the Blues Busters, Alton and Eddie, Bunny and Scully, and – of course – Higgs and Wilson.

A close brethren of Joe Higgs, Alvin ‘Franseeco’ Patterson, later known simply as Seeco, instructed the Wailers, as the Teenagers would become known, in the philosophy of rhythm. Originally from St Ann, Seeco was another professional musician now living in Trench Town. An accomplished hand drummer, he had worked with various of Jamaica’s calypso groups, as well as having had involvement with the Jamaican musical form of mento. The burru style of drumming he played was an African rhythm of liberation welcoming the return of released prisoners of war; it had been co-opted into Rastafari’s Nyabinghi style of inspirational chanting and drum rhythms. And it was this blend of devotion and rebellious fervour that formed the basis of the Wailers’ understanding of rhythm.

Endeavouring to understand and master music was something which Nesta Marley never stopped doing. As soon as he rose in the morning he picked up his guitar, and would rarely be without it for the rest of the day and night, practising immensely hard. With Joe Higgs, the harmony master, Nesta, Bunny, and Peter would often practise and rehearse until five in the morning. Taking a break around 2.30 a.m., they would head over to Ma ChiChi, who sold oily fried-corn dumplings and what was said to be Jamaica’s best soursop juice, so thick you had to tap the bottom of the bottle to get it out; Ma ChiChi only lit her pan at 2.30 a.m., when the dancehalls were closing down.

Other times in the early hours of the morning, the three youths would wander with Joe Higgs down to Back-a-Wall, then to Maypen Cemetery, then over to Hot and Cold. Singing all the time they walked, they would check out the responses to such songs they favoured as Little Antony and the Imperials’ ‘Tears on my Pillow’, the Platters’ ‘My Prayer’, Frankie Lymon’s ‘I’m Not a Juvenile Delinquent’, and Gene Chandler’s ‘Duke of Earl’, with Peter on the vocal bass part. At other times, they would stand on corners or in parks trying out material, or call on such revered local figures as Brother Gifford, One Sam, or Sonny Flight to air their musical wares for them, wondering whether they could detect the trio’s development.

Finally, they even acquired their first conventionally constructed and manufactured guitar. Around the corner of Ebenezer Street and Darling Lane, just off Spanish Town Road, in what is now Tivoli Gardens, was the Ebenezer Boys’ Club, a local youth club. Discovering that the institution possessed its own badly mistreated guitar, hardly larger than a child’s instrument, Bob appropriated it for the group.

It was Peter who could play guitar, and organ and piano, who worked with the instrument more than his two musical partners. One evening, they had been invited over to play in Greenwich Farm at the cold-supper shop of a man called Sheriff Brown, one of the area’s main herbsmen. Late for their show, the three youths were running there, racing each other. Then Peter’s foot collided with Bob’s, and he tumbled. He was carrying the Ebenezer guitar and it was smashed beyond repair.

Almost immediately they acquired a far more satisfactory replacement. It was sold to them by a local man named Deacon, an intellectual, highly literate Rasta who was a cultural historian and had stored and recorded the history of Marcus Garvey. Noticing the guitar hanging on Deacon’s wall, they made him an offer for it.

This guitar was full-sized and in good condition. Nicknaming the instrument ‘Betsy’, as Bo Diddley had christened his guitar, they added an electrical pick-up, and would use it either unamplified or with electricity. Five years later, in 1967, they were still using it on recordings.

It was now public knowledge in Trench Town that Nesta Marley, who was beginning to be known more as Bob, or Bobby or Robbie, was a musician of some sort. At that time, Pauline Morrison lived in the area and was a pupil at Kingston Senior School. Every afternoon she would make her way home from her lessons, usually with a large group of children from the same neighbourhood; they would walk from West Road to Thirteenth Street, to Ninth Street and the Gully Bank and then across a bridge. At the end of a lane, she invariably would see Bob sitting under a broad, tall tree, accompanying himself on a homemade guitar as he sang songs of his own composition. Fifteen or twenty schoolchildren would be gathered all around. It was a regular fixture. ‘We’d come from school and see this guy singing, singing, and we’d always sit around and watch and listen to him. After him finish we clap him, and after we’d go home.’

Bob seemed like a bird, remembered Pauline, ‘like a young hatchling just coming up’. Later, as success started to make his songs familiar, she would recognise some of the tunes from those after-school performances – he would certainly play, for example, an early version of ‘Simmer Down’; those who knew Bob would always hear him singing that song from around the beginning of 1962. (On that long journey back from school, she and her companions would often have had another musical experience: in an entirely different neighbourhood, a young Jimmy Cliff could also be seen singing, planted under the boughs of an ackee tree.)

Although football was almost as much a love for Bob Marley as music, he occasionally would also be seen playing cricket, on that same gully bank Pauline would have had to pass over. Ernest Ranglin would see him knocking a ball about as he passed and sometimes join in for a few minutes. To Ranglin he always seemed a very well-brought-up boy, extremely polite and considerate.

As a youth who knew what he wanted in life, Bob was not caught up in the negative existence of the ghetto bad boy, those packs of adolescents who only desired to emulate and try to surpass the worst exploits of the slum gangs of the United States, glorified and glamorised in movies such as West Side Story that they would catch at the Carib cinema after sneaking in the exit door.

Bob certainly wasn’t some pavement bully. Although, Pauline pointed out, ‘if a guy come for him and trouble him, him can defend himself.’ But even then he operated simultaneously on several levels. On the one hand, he was affable, open, eager to assist. ‘He was a very easygoing person,’ Pauline said. ‘He was never rude or anything. Him never be aggressive. Him was always irie to me, even as a kid coming from school. And although I still get to know him and be around him, him never be rude.’

Then again he could be almost the definition of a loner. ‘It was always the man and his guitar,’ Pauline observed. ‘But it was very rare you could just sit with him and be with him. Because he was a very moody person, the way I see him. Him is very moody. If people were sitting together with him, he would suddenly just get up and go somewhere else. Just to be by himself.’

In the end, Nesta knew, there was only one person he could rely on – himself – although he could expect the occasional unexpected intervention and assistance of others.

TRENCH TOWN ROCK (#ulink_7a38adbd-b8ff-51af-a5b5-84c378a1f444)

On 6 August 1962, Jamaica was granted independence from British colonial rule. A by-product of independence for Trench Town’s population was that a sewage system was almost immediately installed. Two songs that year summed up the optimistic mood of an emergent nation: Lord Creator’s ‘Independent Jamaica’ and ‘Forward March’ by Derrick Morgan. Morgan recorded for the Beverley’s label, owned by a Chinese Jamaican businessman called Leslie Kong who ran Beverley’s Record and Ice Cream Parlor (which also sold stationery) on the corner of North and Orange Street in downtown Kingston. Upstairs, past the seated restaurant area, past the cigarette machine, was where Leslie Kong had his office. Kong had started the label after Morgan had sought finance for the recording of a tune called ‘Dearest Beverley’ which Jimmy Cliff had written, its title shrewdly bearing the same name as Kong’s wife – hence the name of the recording venture. At one stage in 1961, Morgan had seven records in the Jamaican Top Ten; one of the reasons he recorded so prolifically was that Kong only made a flat payment of ten Jamaican dollars per tune. Morgan also, however, had a role as an unofficial talent scout for the Beverley’s label.

In those days, Morgan would drink at a bar on Charles Street by the junction with Spanish Town Road – then known as Back-a-Wall, the area is now notorious as the JLP ‘garrison community’ of Tivoli Gardens.

On Charles Street lived a girlfriend of Morgan’s called Pat Stewart. She was acquainted with an aunt of Nesta’s, a ‘brown woman’, and when the youth visited her one time, Pat heard him sing. ‘Bob can sing good, y’know, Derrick – why not try ’im?’ she suggested.

‘You really do singin’, baas?’ Morgan checked with him in February 1962. The answer came in the affirmative. ‘Me seh well come over Beverley’s nuh: mek me hear you. And ’im come up deh one day and I play the piano and ’im sing the tune “Judge Not”.’

Two or three days later, Nesta turned up at Beverley’s, accompanied by his friend Jimmy Cliff, who was already recording on the label. Morgan thought the youth’s song was good but not great. And he was struck by the fact that Bob seemed to dance almost better than he sang when he auditioned the tune: ‘’im could DANCE.’ Finding himself one night in Cedella’s rum shop, Morgan complimented the boy’s mother on her son’s abilities. ‘You have a son who’s very talented,’ he told her. ‘He has a lot of potential.’

Jimmy Cliff, who lived by the bridge near Queen’s Theatre, recalled a slightly different version of the genesis of the first recording by Bob Marley: ‘Desmond came to me and I introduced him to Leslie Kong, and he got his song recorded. He then went and told Bob, “I know this youth called Jimmy Cliff, and he helped me to get my song recorded.” He then brought Bob to me, and I introduced him to Leslie Kong. And Bob had his song recorded. So that was the first recordings, so it meant a lot. Your first song, it really means a lot.’

Leslie Kong was willing to take a chance. ‘Alright,’ he decreed, ‘mi could try it now.’ The next Saturday morning, Kong drove down to Trench Town and turned up on the doorstep at 19 Second Street, looking for Nesta. His mother told him her son had gone out. Leslie Kong was disappointed: he wanted to offer him a recording contract, he said. But when Nesta came home in the early evening, he had managed to run into Kong, signed the contract, and been paid the five pounds it specified. Generously, a precursor of his later attitude towards finances, the youth gave two pounds to his mother, ten shillings to his aunt Enid, and five shillings to a woman who was visiting from the country.

‘Judge Not’ was recorded at Federal Studios the same month. Bob took Bunny along with him for moral support. ‘Judge Not’ was the joyous gallop of ska, a music at the time as fresh and unique as the nation of Jamaica itself, which the shrill, youthful voice of Bob Marley had as the backbeat to his first recorded work. But the celebratory sound of ‘Judge Not’ could not conceal the biblical tone that was significantly present in his first release: chiding those who passed judgement on himself and his kind, he warns that ‘While you talk about me/ Someone else is judging you.’ The song hardly sold at all and radio play was nonexistent; this was in contrast to the experience of Desmond Dekker, whose first song, ‘Honour Your Father and Your Mother’, was a hit.

At that same session Bob recorded two other ska numbers, ‘Terror’ (‘He who rules by terror do aggrievous wrongs/ In hell I’ll count his error/ Let them hear my song’) and ‘One Cup of Coffee’, which were both put out as 45s, to little avail. ‘One Cup of Coffee’, a strange saga of separation and financial settlement, was a signpost to the sharply observed, visual realism that would become a key feature of Bob Marley’s lyrics in years to come. For now, however, the few listeners that ‘Judge Not’ garnered assumed it was the work of one ‘Bobby Martell’, the name listed on the label: Kong had renamed him with this kitsch moniker in much the same way as he had changed James Chambers’ name to Jimmy Cliff. (Released in England on the new Island Records label, ‘Judge Not’ was credited to ‘Robert Morley’.)

Leslie Kong was largely preoccupied with his new, big-selling vocal act, Jackie Opel, a Barbadian. And when the producer refused to give any more money to ‘Bobby Martell’ the relationship ended. It was said that, after an argument over Kong swindling him, Bob prophesied to the label owner, frightening him, that one day he would make plenty of money out of Bob but would never have the luxury of enjoying it. ‘So Robert said to me,’ said Desmond Dekker, ‘“Look, I’lla dig up.” I said, “Where you goin’?” Him say, “Watch out. I’ll leggo dis Chinaman y’unno. I’ll go up a Coxsone. Yuh a come?” I said, “Well, I gotta wait and see before I make my move.”’

Morgan, however, continued his association and friendship with Bob. The next year he emigrated to the United Kingdom. Kong promoted a pair of farewell shows for him, one at the Capri Theatre in May Penn in the middle of the island, and another in Montego Bay, and Derrick Morgan ensured that Bob was on each bill. Again, Morgan noted that Bob, perhaps through nervousness, had not balanced the energies of his performance especially well. At the Capri Theatre show, for example, ‘when Bob go on stage he was dancin’ more than he was singin’ … An’ ’im tired when ’im come back to the vocal, so me beg ’im and seh: “No, youth: when ya sing two verse you dance, an’ then you go back to your other verse.”’

At the Montego Bay venue, Bob performed as Morgan had suggested. But during ‘One Cup of Coffee’, his first song, he didn’t receive the audience response either of them had expected. In fact, the typically volatile and expressive Jamaican crowd started to boo. ‘The next song, ’im just get up and seh: “Judge not, before you judge yourself!” So the audience think a him mek that song immediately offa dem! And ’im tear dung the whole place with that tune: Judge not, before you judge yourself. When ’im reach a part there the audience ‘ray and seh: Wait, this boy a bad, ’im a jus’ mek a sound offa we, same time, yeah man, an’ deh so ’im hit. That was the last time I see Bob fe a long while.’

Kingstonians, however, were able to see ‘Bobby Martell’ most weeks, at the Queen’s Theatre, as part of the weekly Opportunity Knocks talent shows. These stage shows run by Vere Johns, before an audience of some 600 people, were broadcast on RJR, one of the island’s two radio stations, and featured such guest artists as Higgs and Wilson, and Alton and Eddy. The best contending singer would win a guinea (21 shillings, or £1.10), through the simple test of being brought back for the most encores – if the crowd took against you, you’d be booed off. Bob would steal these shows every time, hurrying away from the venue with his prize before other less successful contenders could beg some of it away from him. He would sing ‘Judge Not’, and another song he had written, ‘Fancy Curls’ (‘Last night your best friend was sick/ Goodness gracious, another of your trick/ Hey little girl with those fancy curls’). For a time Bob was even awarded the nickname ‘Fancy Curls’.

The fact that the records released by Beverley’s hadn’t sold was, after the initial disappointment, irrelevant. Only 16 years old, Bob had been given the sign that he was perfectly justified in imagining that there could be some kind of musical future for him. To make the next step forward, he decided to make a serious go of it with his spars from Trench Town. Accordingly, the Teenagers became first the Wailing Rudeboys, and then the Wailing Wailers, before finally mutating into simply the Wailers.

One of the maxims of a man called Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry who worked for Coxsone Dodd’s sound system, was that every man has a name for a purpose. So it also was and is with groups. And the name ‘The Wailers’ didn’t merely reflect some alleycat screech made by the trio. Whether consciously or unconsciously chosen, it spoke volumes about the deep miasma of anguish and lonely hurt all three, especially Nesta and Peter, had felt within their souls as youths coming up. Bob Marley’s vocals sound sometimes as if he is literally crying. ‘The world “wail” means to cry or to moan,’ said Peter Tosh later. ‘We were living in this so-called ghetto. No one to help them. We felt we were the only ones who could express the people’s feelings through music, and because of that the people loved it. So we did it.’

Definitively ghetto sufferahs, the trio responded to music made by their American equivalents – Ray Charles, Sam Cooke, and the flawless harmonising of the Impressions, led by Curtis Mayfield and Jerry Butler. When the Impressions came to Jamaica in the early 1960s to play warm-up dates before a US tour (the reason so many American acts played in Jamaica), all three Wailers went together to see them at the Carib Theatre, fighting to get up to the front row. The group’s ‘One Love’ utilised sections of the Impressions’ ‘People Get Ready’. The Wailers also recorded versions of the Impressions’ ‘Another Dance’, for Studio One, and ‘Keep On Movin’’, for Scratch Perry.

Looking at it with a clear vision, the future seemed to contain a myriad musical possibilities. But without that hope, the reality of Bob’s then existence only could have been seen as bitterly grim. He had no real source of income, and literally would have starved on occasions if it had not been for Tartar’s kitchen.

A further set of complications was on its way. Bob’s mother Cedella had become pregnant by Toddy, Bunny’s father, giving birth to Pearl Livingston early in 1962; Bob and Bunny were thereby linked even closer by their new half-sister. Bob, meanwhile, had had a passionate affair himself with a local girl, two years younger than he was. Her older brother, though, forbade the girl to carry on the relationship because of Bob’s white blood, a recurring and consistent problem for him. The shock of being the victim of such racism, combined with Pearl taking much of the unstinting attention that Cedella had previously given her son, caused tensions within Bob and in the yard at 19 Second Street. But did her brother have another reason for objecting to his sister associating with Bob Marley? For on 22 May 1963, Cheryl Murray, a local girl, gave birth to Bob Marley’s first child, Imani Carole, conceived when he was sixteen and about whom little is known.