Bob Marley: The Untold Story

It had taken the birth of Pearl to make Cedella realise precisely how hopeless her relationship was with the baby girl’s father. To escape from this unprofitable union and to advance her life, she decided to move to the north-eastern United States, to Wilmington in Delaware, where there was yet another branch of the Malcolm family. She agonised over what to do with her son. But then it was decided that he would stay behind and wait for her to send for him and for Pearl.

Cedella’s sister Enid moved into the home on Second Street to care for her nephew and niece. When Enid moved back to St Ann, however, Toddy Livingston took over the apartment. Although the residence theoretically remained as Bob’s home, he was unhappy when Toddy moved in Ceciline, another of his baby-mothers. Bob turned up at 19 Second Street less and less frequently. Effectively, he found himself homeless, living for a time in west Kingston’s various squatter camps. It was as though, yet again, he had been abandoned. To all intents and purposes, he was destitute. But then Tartar took him in and gave him a corner of the kitchen, in which he also slept. Bob’s bed was the gambling table that Tartar would set up for reasons that were both social and financial: Bob would have to wait until the games had finished to reclaim his bed.

These were very hard times indeed. But in that strange way in which adversity can be turned to advantage, they also served to focus and hone Bob’s art. There was no choice, no other way out. Bunny would come round, and – to a lesser extent – Peter and Junior Braithwaite, and they would sit around practising harmonies until they fell asleep. ‘Me and Bunny used to be the harmony of the group, and we sang harmony like birds,’ said Peter Tosh. ‘We two sing harmony, sound like five. Bob Marley never sing harmony, no time.’

Junior Braithwaite had been born on 4 April 1949 on Third Street and West Road, in what became known as Rema, immediately to the east of Trench Town. Also living on Third Street was Joe Higgs; Roy Wilson, Higgs’s partner in Higgs and Wilson, had been raised by Junior Braithwaite’s grandmother. ‘They used to rehearse in the back of our yard,’ Junior Braithwaite said. ‘So we as kids hang out around them.’ The early Wailers, comprised of Bob, Bunny, Peter, Junior Braithwaite, and a girl they would soon meet called Beverley Kelso was, according to Junior, ‘just a singing group, a harmonising group. We had nothing to do with instruments.’ In the early days of the group, other potential members had been briefly tried out: a couple of tenors, Barrington Sayles and Ricardo Porter, decided for themselves that their voices weren’t really strong enough; meanwhile, ‘P’, the sister of Joe Brown, a rude boy from Second Street, would turn up at early rehearsals, but also came to the conclusion that her vocals were not sufficiently powerful.

Falling back on himself in these endless rehearsals, Bob found his confidence and ability growing almost by the day. To provide light for their sessions, another ghetto-dweller by the name of George Headley Robinson would gather brushwood from all about the area and lug it to Tartar’s yard. Some thirteen years older than Bob, ‘Georgie’, as he was more commonly known, was a devoted believer in the talents of the youth and his musical companions. Georgie, who made his living as a fisherman, would try and instruct Bob in matters of Rastafari, constantly referring to one of the copies of the Bible that are omnipresent in Jamaica. ‘But Bob,’ Georgie said, ‘was too young to reason with me.’

‘Georgie would sit there shirtless all night,’ Tartar recollected, ‘tending the flames as they played.’ When they awoke, after falling asleep exhausted from playing, the fire would still be burning; straightaway Georgie would ‘bwile up some porridge’ or a kettle for some bush tea.

At around this time, unexpectedly, a turning point was reached. Alvin Patterson – Seeco the rhythm master – was acquainted with Clement Dodd, the sound-system man who had begun his own record label. He knew of the auditions that Coxsone would regularly hold on Sundays at Studio One, his new one-track studio on Brentford Road, to the north of Trench Town. In the summer of 1964, at the urging of Joe Higgs, Seeco took Bob and the rest of the group, including Beverley Kelso and another girl called Cherry Smith (also sometimes known as Cherry Green after the surname of her brother) over there one Sunday. Cherry’s real name was Ermine Ortense Bramwell, but she gained the nickname Cherry from her skin’s red hue.

Although Clement ‘Coxsone’ Dodd was not a musician himself, he had what Ernest Ranglin described as ‘an extraordinary pair of ears’. He was also a wizard at contriving musical concepts. ‘He was really the man, the man who came up with the ideas. But he couldn’t play, so he would come and explain it to us. After explaining it, I always knew what the man wanted.’

One Sunday morning in 1959, bass player Cluett ‘Clue-J’ Johnson and Ranglin had been requested by Coxsone in a surprisingly formal manner to meet him at the liquor store he ran in Love Lane. ‘I need something to get away from this blues,’ he told the two master musicians, bemoaning the manner in which Jamaican music was imitating contemporary American black music.

In the store’s backyard, they sat down and worked out the recipe for a new sound; they sought a formula for a music that was distinctly Jamaican whilst retaining its roots in the R’n’B and popular jazz that beamed down into Jamaica from radio stations in the southern American states. Ska, the music that resulted from that Sunday-morning session, was a shuffle boogie rhythm of the type popularised by artists such as Louis Jordan and Erskine Hawkins; the unexpected emphasis on the offbeat only emphasised its addictive flavour. An apocryphal explanation of the galloping sound of ska was that this was a replication of the way music on those southern stations would fade in and out. Ranglin, however, has a simpler explanation: ‘We just wanted it to sound like the theme music from one of those westerns that were on TV all the time in the late 1950s.’ The term ‘ska’ was an abbreviation of ‘skavoovee’, a popular catchphrase of the time, a term of approval, for the use of which ‘Clue-J’ was famous. (Coxsone, for his part, addressed almost every man he encountered as ‘Jackson’, for which verbal eccentricity he was at least equally renowned: when he used the term ‘Jackson’, it frequently indicated disapproval, that the artist was not coming up to scratch.)

The next day, Coxsone went to the JBC Radio studios, which could be hired for recording, and started trying out examples of this new music to be tested on his sound system. The first ska record that was released, after it had received tumultuous acclaim at dances, was ‘Easy Snappin’’ by Theophilus Beckford. It featured pianist Beckford on vocals, ‘Clue-J’ on bass, Ian Pearson on drums, Ken Richards on guitar, Roland Alphonso on tenor sax, and trombonist Rico Rodriguez. The record was a big hit; its B-side was ‘Silky’, featuring Ernest Ranglin on his own composition.

‘Easy Snappin’’ was also the first tune Coxsone recorded at Federal Studio. When Federal bought equipment for a two-track, Coxsone bought their original one-track from them and installed it in new premises, a former nightclub, he was taking over at 13 Brentford Road in the Crossroads area of Kingston. As well as housing his new studio, Coxsone also opened a further liquor store within it. After a time, Federal graduated to an eight-track machine, and Coxsone purchased their two-track.

It was to these new premises, which would form the base and basis of Clement Dodd’s Studio One label, that Seeco took the Wailers. Listening to them in his studio’s dusty yard, beneath the mango tree that was the location of these weekly auditions, Coxsone liked their sound and several of the songs they had written. But he didn’t truly bite it until they played their fifth tune: Bunny suggested ‘Simmer Down’, the song Bob had been playing about with for at least two years. Before Bob answered, Peter started playing it. They hadn’t even sung a full verse before Coxsone declared, ‘Okay, that one: come tomorrow and we’ll record that one.’

‘I was very impressed with them the first time,’ remembered Coxsone. ‘I was hoping to really get a kind of group with that team feel, young voices and things like that. But they need a lot of polishing.’

Bob Marley himself wasn’t as enthused about ‘Simmer Down’ as Coxsone and the rest of the group: Coxsone knew it would work as a sound-system song, but Bob allegedly saw the tune, so old it had become part of his mental furniture, as a nursery-rhyme-type number – paradoxically, much of ‘Simmer Down’, as it had originally been conceived, is sound-system battle-talk. However, he would not let his personal opinion interfere with an opportunity to make another record.

Coxsone Dodd signed the Wailers as both performers and songwriters. They were offered his standard deal: a five-year contract for exclusive recording rights and management, and a guarantee of twenty pounds between them for every side.

The money on offer was so small that it hardly improved the group’s financial position one iota. Accordingly, for the entire time they would record with Coxsone Dodd, the Wailers would get by with that same routine of hustle-hustle-scrape employed by much of the local youth merely to keep existing. Going down to the beach and fishing with a rod and line, they would take what they caught to the market, exchanging the fish for other food; off the local trees they would pick mangoes, ackee, guinips, tambrines, and June-plums and sell them; they would also gather up any scrap metal or bottles, and regularly would voyage over to the nearby dairy farm to pick up all the lead that came off the milk tins. Sponsored when necessary by his father, Bunny was more likely to have a few pence in his pockets. Peter was the only one with any sort of job, pressing clothes at a local dry-cleaner’s run by a friend; he would care for the Wailers’ stage outfits, and also their day-to-day clothes – they each had two pairs of pants and two shirts. Bob, meanwhile, would simply try to somehow get by.

When, within days, the first session took place, the sides chosen were not ‘Simmer Down’ but ‘I’m Still Waiting’ and ‘It Hurts to be Alone’, engineered by Sid ‘Siddie’ Bucknor, Coxsone Dodd’s cousin, who performed the same function on most of their Studio One work. Although Coxsone had marked out ‘Simmer Down’ for release as a single, he first wanted to establish interest in the Wailers by pushing another song to be promoted by his several sound system sets. ‘They had songs that was all do-over material, early doo-wop stuff, so I instructed them to try and do some writing.’ Out of an evening’s work at Studio One, overseen by Coxsone and Ernest Ranglin, had come ‘I’m Still Waiting’ and ‘It Hurts to Be Alone’. The first song was a beautiful Bob Marley original, even though the preamble of the vocal harmonies owed much to the Impressions. But when Bob delivered his breathtakingly sweet vocal solo, it bled from a tearful heart; suspended in a void of echoing pain, his voice felt as though it was recorded at a different, slowed-down speed from the rest of the track. ‘It Hurts to be Alone’ was a Junior Braithwaite number, on which he sang lead. As Coxsone’s house arranger, Ernest Ranglin oversaw the production of the pair of sides.

The instrumentation was basic: Lloyd Knibbs on drums, Lloyd Brevett on bass, and Jah Jerry Haines on guitar. Bob, noted Jah Jerry, was ‘a nice boy, a nice young feller: not a rough guy, a polite guy’.

For once Ranglin didn’t have to spice up the song with guitar overdubs. ‘You could see they had something in them. They were all very nice guys, but they seemed very young. And little too.’ Braithwaite, in particular, was very short, whilst both Bob and Bunny stood not much more than five foot four inches in height; by comparison, Peter Tosh, at six feet four, seemed to tower over the rest of the group. After Coxsone had pressed up three hundred copies of the two tunes, they were distributed to sound systems; the word came back that ‘It Hurts to be Alone’ was going down well.

As soon as Coxsone heard this, he called the group back to the studio. But there had been changes of which no one had notified him. Junior Braithwaite wasn’t with them: to Coxsone’s surprise and initial chagrin he learned that Braithwaite was in the final stages of preparing to leave Jamaica for Chicago with his family. ‘I only lead sung on “It Hurts to be Alone”,’ said Junior. ‘And that was the day, 28 August 1964, just before I flew out of Jamaica. Because they had to have me do a solo just before I left, and so it only took a few hours to learn this new tune, and one take. We were that tough, man.’

If Coxsone were to continue working with the group, the producer insisted, the Wailers required a clearly defined lead vocalist. After some discussion, it was decided that the task should fall to Bob Marley; Bunny and Peter were promised they would also get their share of lead vocals. Coxsone was encouraged in this decision by ‘Simmer Down’, the contract-winning song Bob had sung at the audition which served a dual purpose: a warning to the newly emergent rude boys – that tribal grouping of cool, disaffected, and desperate youth – not to bring down the wrath of the law upon themselves; and a frustrated response to a letter from Bob’s mother in the United States, fearful that her only son was becoming involved with bad company.

The full panoply of his label’s finest ska musicians was summoned by Coxsone for the session. Yet again Ernest Ranglin arranged the tune, whilst Don Drummond, Jamaica’s king of the trombone, added his deeply creative jazz parts. Drummond, who had played with Ranglin in the Eric Dean Orchestra, was the virtuoso of a group of musicians who shortly were to be working together, for a little over a year, under the name of the Skatalites, an ensemble that would in time become legendary. As well as Drummond, the group included Roland Alphonso and Tommy McCook, the group’s leader, on tenor sax, Lester Sterling on alto sax, Johnny ‘Dizzy’ Moore on trumpet, Jah Jerry on guitar, Lloyd Nibbs on drums, Lloyd Brevitt on bass and Jackie Mittoo on keyboards, along with Theophilus Beckford and Clue-J Johnson.

Being part of this elite team was far more financially remunerative than being one of the accredited artists on the record label. Coxsone paid £2 a tune per musician, and frequently they would record twenty songs in a day. One bonanza day, Jah Jerry worked on fifty songs in an epic session at Beverley’s. In 1964, this kind of money would have meant you were considered rich in the United Kingdom or even in the United States, let alone in impoverished Jamaica. Often hanging around at 13 Brentford Road was Jackie Opel, the Bajan vocal star, first pushed by Leslie Kong, and renowned for the rare six-octave range with which he would perform his soul tunes; his ‘Cry Me a River’ (aka ‘You Gotta Cry’) tune had sold a million copies in Jamaica, Britain, and the US, and it was said that Coxsone was anxious that he should not learn of this. (When in 1970 Jackie Opel was in a fatal car-crash on a highway in his native Barbados, there were some who attributed this to the effects of obeah.) Notwithstanding the financial imbalance between Studio One’s session musicians and the Wailers, Jah Jerry could not but help being struck by their extreme confidence on the ‘Simmer Down’ session. This was a mark, he was sure, of their regular, rigorous rehearsals.

The Wailers, noted Johnny Moore, trumpet player for the Skatalites, had first come along to Studio One ‘more or less as the Impressions: they were dissuaded from going along that line, and influenced to go inside themselves, however silly or simple they feared what they found there might sound like. They were simply urged to try and cultivate their own thing. And it worked. Even at that age they knew what they wanted. From the time that they realised that trying to be the Impressions was not what they should be doing, they really checked themselves and got into it. You can hear it in the music.

‘At the time they were young and vibrant, and you could see they were very good friends: they were very, very close to one another. They really did care about each other. I guess that’s why they made a success of it as it was.

‘Bob didn’t necessarily seem like the leader. The thing was so closely knit, the sound, whatever they were trying to get at: that was the objective, the force of what they were trying to accomplish. Rather than worrying about you lead or me lead: everyone would put their shoulder and heave-ho. They seemed to realise that it’s much easier to get things done that way.’

It was for professional reasons that Joe Higgs would accompany the group up from Trench Town to Studio One. ‘Wailers weren’t even conscious of sound when I started to deal with them. To hear that “Joe assisted with the Wailers” – this is foolishness. The Wailers weren’t singers until I taught them. It took me years to teach Bob Marley what sound consciousness was about. It took me years to teach the Wailers. For example, they will be going to make a record and I would go with them and there is somebody making constant mistakes. I would just have to take his part to get the record finished in time.’

(Interestingly, at this time, Peter Tosh brought a potential singer called Leonard Dillon to Studio One. Although he would later form the Ethiopians with Aston Morrison and Stephen Taylor, Dillon recorded four tunes as a solo act for Coxsone Dodd, under the nom-de-disque of Jack Sparrow; he was backed on all of them by the voices of the Wailers, with the tunes arranged to an extent by Lee Perry but largely by Jackie Mittoo, the label’s driving force from 1964 to 1969, its golden period. Working as musical director, principal arranger and keyboard player, Mittoo’s relaxed, cool style on his Hammond B3 organ would make him a legend. But, according to Dillon, who occasionally played trumpet with the Skatalites, the legend that Bob Marley became was not at that point the main thrust behind the Wailers. Instead, he said, he felt it was Bunny Livingston who was pushing the group along.)

Beverley Kelso was born on 14 April 1948, the third eldest of three sisters and four brothers, in Jones Town. But when she was three her family moved to 4 Fifth Street in Trench Town. The popular conception of Trench Town as an area of grinding poverty was not the place that Beverley knew: ‘Trench Town people dressed to their best. I would say there wasn’t poor people, because majority of Trench Town people go to high school, they’re educated people.’

Also on Fifth Street lived Alton Ellis and his family: the entire neighbourhood would gather to watch him and his talented sister Hortense rehearse in their yard. Even at a young age, Beverley Kelso knew something of the art of singing. In the school choir at Denham Town primary school, she was the lead vocalist on the hymns they would perform at morning assembly. The then zenith of her vocal achievements was when she performed solo, singing ‘I Waited for the Lord’ at St Andrew Scots Kirk for Queen Elizabeth II on the 1954 visit to the island by the newly crowned British monarch. ‘I was the first to sing. They didn’t even wait until the song finished, they were just clapping. And then that made me sing for the better.’

To perform before Queen Elizabeth, Beverley needed to overcome her natural shyness. ‘Sometimes we’d all just sit there on the side of the road and somebody would start to sing something. But I was a quiet one. I never bother. I just shut up and listen. But I loved the singing. But I was so shy. I’m still shy.’

Ten years after that regal performance, some friends of Beverley persuaded her to accompany them to Chocomo Lawn, the celebrated outdoor dancehall in Denham Town, west Kingston. (Although run in conjunction with Edward Seaga and the JLP, Chocomo’s appeal overrode its political affiliation.) When she arrived there, they asked her to perform, suggesting she sing Patti LaBelle’s ‘Down the Aisle’. And the moment Beverley uttered the opening lines, ‘the fence tear down,’ the crowd pushing forward to see her: this made Beverley so nervous that she started the song all over again.

The next evening, after she had returned home from school, Beverley was cleaning the kitchen when there was a knock on the door. Bob Marley, who had seen her Chocomo Lawn performance, was standing there. ‘I asked him, “You want somebody?” He said, “Yes, you.” I said, “Me?” And he said, “Yeah, I’d like it if you’d sing a song with me.” So I said, “Well, you’ll have to ask my mother if you want me to sing with you. But my mother is not here now. She went to work.”’

Beverley had never met Bob before. ‘My first impression of him was ordinary. Ordinary. I didn’t think of him as nobody special. But he was very polite. Never sad. Even that evening he was just smiling. He was just looking at me, like, oh, pretty girl. That’s what I have in my mind.

‘When he came back my mother was there. And he asked her and she said, “Yes, but you’ll have to take care of her.” He asked me if I could come and rehearse the same evening.’

Beverley knew where to go, the fourth yard on Second Street, because her family would buy bread from Sonny and Gertie Hibbert, who lived at 13 Second Street, across the road from a rehearsal yard at 14 Second Street. ‘So I went up and when I went there Peter, Bunny, and Junior was sitting under a tree on a workbench. Bob wasn’t there.’

Bob had gone off to collect their guitar. When he returned with it, he introduced Beverley to Peter, Bunny, and Junior. But, she emphasised, ‘I didn’t call him Bob and nobody in Trench Town called him Bob. He introduced himself to me as Lester.’ One might assume this to be a misremembering of ‘Nesta’, precisely what had concerned the boy’s mother when his father suggested the name. Yet Cherry Smith – shortly also to be singing with the Wailers – also believed that Bob was called ‘Lester’: had he renamed himself with such a corruption of his original first name? Or is this simply an example of Jamaican word mutation, in which aural misunderstandings translate into such oral errors as ‘Matthews Lane’ being pronounced as ‘Mattress Lane’? It was only shortly afterwards that Rita Anderson first met him, and she insists he was known to all Trench Town as ‘Robbie’. It is worth remembering that, in Jamaica, people are often known by several different names and nicknames – for example, ‘Little’ Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry, the ‘Upsetter’.

At Beverley Kelso’s evening encounter with ‘Lester’ and his fellow musicians, she immediately began to rehearse ‘Simmer Down’ with them. In rehearsal, ‘Simmer Down’ had seemed like some tough Jamaican variant of the protest ‘message’ songs newly popular in the United States. In the recording studio, however, it became positively transcendent. Popular songs with lines about the running bellies of nanny-goats? This song was not only very unusual, but also tied together by an extremely commercial set of hooks.

‘Control your temper/ Simmer down/ The battle will get hotter/ Simmer down,’ declared Bob on what was one of his greatest songs. In the style unique to Coxsone’s label, the voices are buried back in the mix, fighting to get out with the same ferocity with which they had tried to liberate themselves from the dead-end of the ghetto. Could the vocal sound have been a reflection of the studio conditions? On the ‘Simmer Down’ session, Bob Marley stood directly in front of the microphone, flanked on either side by Bunny and Peter, forming a half-circle, their faces almost touching. Coxsone himself engineered the recording on his portable one-track that he unplugged and took home at the end of the session.

Also providing backing vocals – though not on the earliest recording sessions – was Cherry Smith. Cherry was born Ermine Bramwell in Upper Trench Town on 22 August 1943, although the family soon moved to Jones Town. ‘Green’ was her half-brother’s surname, which she took when her father died in 1958, after which they moved to Second Street in Trench Town. Her father, a dentist, had been relatively affluent, and the family had a large radiogram in the house, ideal for listening every Saturday night to the latest hit tunes on Duke Reid’s radio show – she would turn it up loud so that all the neighbours could hear. Her musical Trench Town neighbours included Lascelles Perkins, Alton Ellis and his sister Hortense, Jimmy Tucker, a group called the Schoolboys, which included ‘Pipe’ Matthews and ‘Bread’ MacDonald, later of the Wailing Souls, and the ubiquitous Higgs and Wilson.

At the Baptist Church Sunday School she would sing songs such as ‘Let the Lord be Seen in You’, which she would later record with the Wailers for Coxsone Dodd. Yet it was in American popular music that lay her main musical love: ‘Harry Belafonte, Nat King Cole, Duke Ellington, and all those kind of big-band people.’

One day Joe Higgs heard Cherry’s voice, as she copied a recent American hit tune whilst she washed clothes in the yard. ‘My voice was way up there and he stopped immediately. He said, “Cherry, that’s you?” So I said, “Yeah.” We used to listen to him and he would tell us little things,’ she said.

Another figure in the area familiar to her was the Marley boy: ‘All the little girls used to like him. Nice boy. He was funny. Cracking jokes. Teasing. He used to be shy, though.’ She recalled a significant sobriquet that was given to him: ‘We used to call him “Little White Boy”, cos his hair was curly.’ Rather than offering a judgement, the nickname seemed to be one of affection: contrary to the myth, Cherry does not believe that being a ‘browning’, as mixed-race individuals are frequently known in Jamaica, led the teenage Bob Marley to be picked on in any way. ‘We was all kids. We grew up with all different people. There was two Chinese boy, they live in the Bronx now. They had a grocery shop there right in front of where they guys used to rehearse. Mr Lee’s.’

But Cherry was struck by Bob’s appearance, hardly that of a ragamuffin ghetto boy: Nesta and Bunny, she said, ‘used to dress nice in the Fifth Avenue shoes and nice shirt.’ Peter, she remembered, invariably would be with them: ‘Peter come with his guitar. Peter was always feisty, he had an attitude. Bossy, mouthy, oh yes. Full of joke.’ More than the other two, Peter came the closest to personifying high-spirited pushiness. Not once, for example, did Cherry recall Nesta getting into a fight; invariably she saw him out with Bunny: ‘You always see both of them together. They were polite, well-mannered, intelligent. Like I said, we would just sit down and we would sing. Somebody try to do the bass, I think a guy named Barrington Sales. But he wasn’t strong enough. Then Peter come. And Georgie. Bob would say, “No, mon, that’s not your part.” You know, so everybody would try to sing.’

Cherry remembered a favourite spot of theirs, by Third Street and West Road, where they would sit and sing on the pavement, ‘by the Branch yard. It’s like the JLP. It’s a place, like a yard where they have meetings, and a youth club.’ Singing with the three of them would be ‘Cardo’ – Ricardo Scott, who eventually moved to the USA, where he gained medical and law degrees.

Unfortunately, Cherry Smith was unavailable for the first Coxsone Dodd sessions, having a regular well-paid seasonal job with Caribbean Preserving, providing money she needed to keep her 3-year-old daughter. Hence she was not available for the photographs of the line-up that featured Bob, Bunny, Peter, and Beverley Kelso. ‘When Junior Braithwaite left, that’s when I took his space,’ she said. Cherry sang on the recordings of ‘Amen’, ‘Lonesome Feelings’, ‘Maga Dog’, and ‘There She Goes’. But she also thought she sang on ‘I am Going Home’ (which both Bunny and Coxsone believed was recorded in the first session).

Before studio sessions, all concerned paid assiduous attention to mastering their parts in outdoor rehearsals, lit by a kerosene lamp or a fire, or simply the rays of the moon. ‘We rehearse and we rehearse, rehearse, until we know the song. And they would say, “Well, tomorrow we going up to the studio.” So we all get ready, get dressed and we walked with each other, a long walk. It’s nervous: a lot of people there. And we come back late in the night and we have to walk through this burying ground. ’Cause that’s the shortest way.’

Cherry Smith always felt that it was Junior Braithwaite who owned the finest voice of them all: ‘Oh yes. He carried.’ But as far as she was concerned, her singing excursions were only for fun – ’cause we didn’t get pay for it. We didn’t get nothing. He give us £5 to buy a dress.’ She and Beverley wore identical dresses for the only live show Cherry Smith played with the Wailers, at the Sombrero, shortly after she had recorded the ‘Maga Dog’ tune with Peter Tosh. As time passed at Studio One, however, the two girls would gradually fall away from the group.

Before the instant popularity of ‘Simmer Down’ had time truly to translate into sales, Bob found himself onstage as lead singer for the first time at that show at the Sombrero Club in Kingston. At the helm of the Wailers, he steered the group to a performance that stole the event, assisted in great part by the crisp and clear sound that Count Machuki, who had started as a DJ with Coxsone’s sound system, obtained for him at the mixing desk. The audience response was overwhelming, but the other artists on the show were vex. Both these acts recorded for Coxsone: did they sense a conspiracy?