Bob Marley Essay Research Paper email lapommehotmailcomBob

Bob Marley Essay, Research Paper

email: la_pomme@hotmail.comBob MarleyBob Marley is the greatest reggae musician of all time. More than any other musician, Bob Marley was responsible for bringing reggae music out of the slums of Jamaica to international audiences. During his nineteen year career, independently and with the Wailers, Marley blended the rebel rhythms of reggae with his message of anti-racism, equality and freedom from oppression. Today his music continues to influence musicians as diverse as Paul Simon. In 1944, a fifty year old British military man named Captain Norval Marley married an eighteen year old black Jamaican girl named Cadella Booker. They had a son, Robert Nesta Marley, later known as Bob. He was born February 6, 1945 in Nine Miles, Jamaica. Captain Marley seldom saw his son, although he provided some financial support for the family. When Bob was five years old, he was kidnapped by his father and taken to Kingston, Jamaica s capital. He was reunited with his mother about a year later. Bob and his mother lived in one of the most dangerous slums of Kingston. These living conditions later inspired Marley to write a song called Concrete Jungle , which likened the living conditions and poverty in the slum to the shackles of slavery. Bob s father, Norval Marley, died when Bob was ten years of age. Bob only saw his father for the year that he was kidnapped, and this is what he said many years later in 1978. .my father, was a guy coming from England, yunno, the kind of guy like during the slave period: the white who catch a black woman and make her a baby. An English man . I think. Because I only saw him once, yunno. My mother. My mother is an African While Bob lived in the shanty part of Kingston, there was another family with a boy Bob s age. His name was Bunny. Bunny became a brother for Bob. They sang together everyday after school. They made their own instruments. With their adolescence voice, Bob and Bunny began in 1960 to build what one day became the Wailer s music.In Kingston, musicians were developing a new sound, a new mixture of mento (a kind of calypso) and rhythm and blues. The result of this mixture was called Jamaican Ska. Bob and Bunny were fascinated with America s rhythm and blues singers such as Fats Domino, and Louis Jordan. The Drifters , and particularly the Impressions had the most impact on them.Bob, like may other Jamaican teenagers, found music a relief from the realities of ghetto life. All youths were looking for a way out of the endless cycle of poverty. Crime was a solution for some, know as rudies , but it almost certainly ended in an early death on the violent Kingston streets. When Bob attended school, he dreamed of music. However, schoolwork prepared him for big dreams, which would only result in empty solutions. The life he was destined for in Trench Town had nothing to do with math and science. By the time he was fifteen, he had quit school, and became a welder s apprentice. At least this way he could bring some money into the household. Ska spread like a fever through the restless teenage masses, and Bob was easily distracted from his welding work as he concentrated on mastering the new ska harmonies. While welding one day, a piece of burning hot metal flew into his eye and ended his welding career. He told his mother that he was actually relieved, because it meant he could spend more time on his recording career. Noone took him too seriously, because at that time everyone wanted to be a recording star. The people Bob grew up with in the Kingston slums were drawn towards a particular Rastafarian named Joe Higgs. Bob realized that he couldn t make any progress with his music without the help of someone else. He needed someone who could teach him techniques, like how to project his voice and to hold harmony. Joe Higgs held free music clinics at his home in the ghetto, only a street away from Bob s home. So Bob and Bunny attended his classes just about every single day. At 16, Marley was desperate for his first album. Little did he know that his recording career would lead him on a spiritual journey and make him the Third World s first international superstar. In 1962, Bob Marley released his first album Judge Not with Bunny and another friend Peter McIntosh. That year, after Bob released that album, he formed the Wailing Wailers. They consisted of Bunny Livingstone, Peter McIntosh, Joey Brathwaite and Bob Marley himself. The group was named the Wailers because in those days we were always crying The Jamaican ska music had changed by slowing down and becoming a little more sexual. Bob and the Wailers called the results rude boy music. Some of the first songs of this type were Stir it Up , and Back out ( back out .and shut your mouth .making thing go slow ) Also, the rude boy themes of earlier songs changed to those of social and spiritual issues as the group became more focused on Rastafarianism. On February 10, 1966, Bob Marley married a woman named Rita Anderson. The next day, Bob was on a plane to visit his mother in Deleware. Prior to that, his mother had written him several times asking him to come visit her in the United States. She wanted him to settle there, but he was impatient to get back to the Wailers in Jamaica. He worked in America just enough to be able to finance his music, and then he returned to Jamaica seven months later. In Jamaica, the Rastafarian way of life was taking over many individuals. Bunny had been a