The Biography Of Bob Marley
Bob Marley was born on February 6, 1945 to Cedella and Norval Marley in a small town in Jamaica called Nine Miles. Nine Miles is a town known for continuing African ancestral customs and using storytelling to share old traditions. This would provide “a deeper cultural context and an aura of mysticism” (bobmarley.com) to his music later in his life. His mother worked as a singer-songwriter while his father was a supervisor and a nearby plantation, so through his mother, Bob already had the music gene. Norval Marley’s family strongly disapproved of his and Cedella’s union that occurred in the same year of Bob’s birth, so Norval left his son and Cedella until Bob was five years old when he took him to Kingston, Jamaica’s capital, to attend school and live with his nephew. However, a little more than a year later, Cedella found out Bob was not living with his uncle, but actually with an elderly couple and not attending school, so she brought him back to Nine Miles to live with her.
In the late 1950s teenaged Bob Marley moved back to Kingstown and lived in a low-income neighborhood called Trench Town. Trench Town is comprised of small “squatter” settlements that many families lived in at a time. While living in Trench Town, Bob learned how to defend himself from local gangs which earned him the nickname Tuff Gong. By the 1960s, Jamaica’s music was beginning to develop into what people hear today. A musical form was created on the island called ska. Ska was influenced by America’s R&B and soul genres but was made its own by adding an offbeat. This type of music was popular in poor neighborhoods as it helped the children feel better and took their attention off the realities of living in an unsafe area.
Ska not only changed the lives of many young teenagers, but it inspired Bob Marley to pursue music. He quit school at 14 years old but was an apprentice for a welder to earn money and potentially find a career to last his life. However, in 1961, when Bob Marley was 16 years old, he met Desmond Dekker, an aspiring singer who would end up making it on the UK charts eight years after they met. This was when Bob knew he did not want to do anything else with his life, he only wanted to be a musician. Dekker then introduced him to Jimmy Cliff, who already had multiple hit songs at 14 and would end up being an actor in several movies later. A year later, Bob met Leslie Kong, a music producer and founder of Beverley’s Records. Kong focused primarily on creating ska music and made his break in the United Kingdom in 1967 when his song ‘007’ by Desmond Dekker & the Aces hit number 12 on the UK chart. The success from Kong’s record label created the musical form reggae. In 1962, Bob Marley made his first singles for Leslie Kong, but ended up not being successful. He left Kong’s record company by telling him, “he would make a lot of money from his recordings one day, but he would never be able to enjoy it,” (bobmarley.com).
