Bob Marley: A world music legend
Four months after Jamaica celebrates 55 years of Independence from British rule, the Marley family will observe 40 years since patriarch Robert Nesta ‘B’ b Marley delivered perhaps his most famous Jamaican performance ever.
The accolades bestowed upon the Tuff Gong have been numerous and from impeccable sources - Time Magazine named his 1977 release Exodus Album of the Century, BBC identified One Love as Song of the Millennium for second thousand years AD, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame I in 1994 h and he is 11th on Rolling Stone Magazine’s list of top 199 artistes and 10th on their ranking of top 100 singers. However, it was on a December night in 1976 that Marley transcended music to become a legend.
He had been shot, along with his wife Rita and manager Don Taylor, at his 56 Hope Road, St Andrew, home on December 3 and it was uncertain that he would perform. As Elaine Wint said at a Smile Jamaica 40th anniversary observation at 56 Hope Road (now the Bob Marley Museum) on December 3, 2016, no one was sure that he would turn up at National Heroes Circle. When Marley did, she said, "we only heard 'he's here'. There was no time to do any long introduction ... . All I could say was 'ladies and gentlemen, the man leave his sick bed to come and sing for you'", Wint asking the audience members if they were not going to cheer for Marley as there was this silence "like a hush of awe".
Marley awed more than the reportedly 80,000 people in the park that night, earning a UNESCO Peace Medal for his act of musical defiance. Two years later, at the Noël Love Peace Concert in the National Stadium, he clenched Opposition Leader Edward Seaga and Prime Minister Michael Manley’s hands over his head as he called or political peace in Jamaica.
Marley's records are a keepsake. From Judge Not (1961) to a live version of Redemption Song done in 1980, the four-disc Songs of Freedom box set gives as comprehensive an overview of Bob Marley’s music, including the famed 1970s with the Island Records albums, beginning with Catch a fire and with the 1984 greatest hit compilation Legend.
Exodus, which ends with One Love/People Get Ready, was made during the time Marley was in England after the Smile Jamaica incident, a period that his son referred to as the exile in an interview with The Gleaner earlier this year. There are those Jamaicans who believe that Marley’s presence at National Heroes Circle should be more permanent than the historic 80 minutes of the Smile Jamaica concert.
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