The story of Bob Marley

From Nine Mile to Trenchtown

Robert Nesta Marley was born on the sixth of February 1945, on his grandfather's farm in Nine Mile, a village in the hills of Saint Ann Parish, Jamaica. His mother, Cedella Malcolm, was eighteen. His father, Norval Marley, was a white man born in Sussex, England, and he was around sixty. Norval liked to be called Captain, although he had only ever been a private in the British Army. He gave the family little money and was rarely around, and he died when Bob was ten. Bob grew up mixed race in a black village, and he later said he was on neither the black man's side nor the white man's side, but on God's side.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Music came early. His grandfather Omeriah was a respected farmer and bush doctor, and an early musical influence. At school in Nine Mile, Bob became friends with a boy called Neville Livingston, who the world would later know as Bunny Wailer. In the late 1950s, Cedella moved to Kingston with her son, and they settled in Trenchtown, a government housing project in the west of the city. The two families grew even closer there. Cedella and Bunny's father, Thaddeus Livingston, had a daughter together, Claudette Pearl, so Bob and Bunny shared a little sister. With the boys living under one roof, they spent their evenings chasing ska and the American rhythm and blues drifting in from American radio stations.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Trenchtown had its own music teacher. A singer called Joe Higgs, half of the successful duo Higgs and Wilson, held informal lessons in his yard, free of charge, for young hopefuls. He taught harmony, breathing and voice technique, and he began showing Bob the guitar. It was at those sessions that Bob and Bunny met Winston Hubert McIntosh, a tall, sharp tongued teenager from Westmoreland who had taught himself guitar by watching a man play one song for half a day. He would soon call himself Peter Tosh. At first Peter was the only one of them who could really play an instrument. Bunny later said the others learned from him.[1] [2] [3]

Bob's first shot at a record came in 1962. Through the young star Jimmy Cliff, who was scouting talent, he got to Leslie Kong, who ran a restaurant, ice cream parlour and record shop called Beverley's on Orange Street in Kingston. Kong recorded four songs with the teenager, including Judge Not and One Cup of Coffee, which came out under the made up name Bobby Martell. Bunny had meant to audition for Kong too, but he was late getting out of school and missed his chance. The singles went nowhere. Bob decided he would have better luck in a group, with his friends from the yard.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The Wailing Wailers at Studio One

In 1963 the friends formed a vocal group. Along with Bob, Bunny and Peter there was Junior Braithwaite, who had a high, sweet voice, and two backing singers, Beverley Kelso and Cherry Smith. They went through names quickly: the Teenagers, then the Wailing Rudeboys, then the Wailing Wailers. Joe Higgs introduced them to Clement Coxsone Dodd, who had just opened Studio One on Brentford Road, the first black owned recording studio in Jamaica, and who held auditions on Sunday evenings. Dodd heard something. Years later he said Junior Braithwaite had the best voice in the group, and Bob admitted Junior sounded a bit like one of the Jackson Five.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Their first single was Simmer Down, cut at Studio One with the great house band the Skatalites behind them. Beverley Kelso remembered rehearsing under a mango tree on Second Street in Trenchtown, then going into the studio the next morning and singing it about ten times while Dodd chased the perfect take. The song told the rude boys of Kingston's ghettos to cool their tempers, and in February 1964 it went to number one in Jamaica. It sold something like seventy to eighty thousand copies, depending on who is counting. Oddly, Peter Tosh later said he hated it. But it was a new thing: Jamaican kids singing about their own streets instead of copying American records.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The line up did not hold. Junior Braithwaite left in 1964 for the United States, hoping to study medicine, and Beverley Kelso and Cherry Smith were gone by the end of 1965. That left the core trio of Bob, Bunny and Peter, trading lead vocals. Their first album, The Wailing Wailers, collected singles from those years, including the first version of One Love. In February 1966 Bob married a young singer named Rita Anderson, who led a Studio One group called the Soulettes. The very next day, by Rita's account, he left for Wilmington, Delaware, where his mother now lived, to earn some money.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

In Delaware, Bob worked as a lab assistant at DuPont and on the assembly line and forklift at a Chrysler plant in Newark, under the name Donald Marley. While he was away, in April 1966, Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia visited Jamaica, and huge crowds of Rastafarians met his plane. Rita watched the motorcade pass and believed she saw the marks of nails in his palm. She wrote to Bob about her conversion. Bob had been raised Catholic, but when he came home he took up the faith too, guided by the Rasta elder Mortimer Planno, and began growing his locks.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Rocksteady, Perry and the birth of reggae

Back in Kingston the trio wanted control of their own work, and in 1966 they started a label called Wail N Soul M. Money was always short, and they fell out with Coxsone Dodd over it. In 1967 Bunny was arrested for cannabis possession and served fourteen months in prison, and for a while Rita stepped in to sing his parts. Around 1968 the American singer Johnny Nash and his manager Danny Sims found the Wailers at a Rastafarian gathering. Sims signed Bob, Rita and Peter to his JAD label and his publishing company, Cayman Music, for about fifty Jamaican dollars a week. That contract would cause trouble for years.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

In 1969 the beat slowed again. Rocksteady was giving way to a steady, ticking rhythm called reggae, and Bob went back to Leslie Kong, now one of its leading producers. Kong put the Wailers with his studio musicians and cut the tracks that became The Best of the Wailers, released in 1971. Then something grim happened, or at least a story grew around it. Kong planned to put the tracks out as an album, and the Wailers objected. Kong went ahead, and in August 1971 he died of a heart attack at thirty seven. Jamaica has told the story of what Bunny said to him ever since.[1] [2] [3]

The most important partnership of the period was with Lee Scratch Perry, the wild, brilliant producer who ran a studio band called the Upsetters. Perry had lost interest in singers, but Bob talked him round. Working through 1970 and 1971, they made Soul Rebels and Soul Revolution Part Two, with songs like Duppy Conqueror, Small Axe and Sun Is Shining. Many fans still rank this as the Wailers' finest work. It also brought two crucial men into the story, the Upsetters' bass player Aston Barrett, known as Family Man, and his younger brother Carlton on drums. Ali Campbell of UB40 has said the Barrett brothers invented reggae as we know it.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Bob also had an eye on America. Johnny Nash took him to Sweden to write music for a film called Want So Much to Believe, and in late 1971 Bob toured Britain with Nash. A solo single, Reggae on Broadway, was meant to break him and sank without trace. Nash, meanwhile, did very well with Bob's songs. His album I Can See Clearly Now included four Marley compositions, and his cover of Stir It Up became a hit. By 1972 the whole Wailers trio was in London recording for CBS. The sessions collapsed in arguments with Nash and Sims, and the band found themselves stranded, broke, and without work permits.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Catch a Fire and the original Wailers' last stand

Their London road manager, Brent Clarke, suggested they go and see Chris Blackwell, the white Jamaican who ran Island Records and had already put out some of their Studio One singles in Britain. The Wailers went in to argue about royalties. They came out with an advance of four thousand pounds to make an album, without even signing a contract. Blackwell had just lost his biggest reggae star, Jimmy Cliff, and he saw in Bob a figure who could reach the rock audience. He later said that when Bob walked in, he really was that image. The money got them home to Jamaica to record.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

They recorded Catch a Fire in Kingston in 1972, at Dynamic Sound, Harry J's and Randy's, with the Barretts as the engine room and Rita and Marcia Griffiths singing backing parts. Bob then flew to London with the tapes. At Island's Basing Street studio, Blackwell reshaped the music for rock ears. He smoothed the heavy bass, cut two tracks, and brought in the Alabama session guitarist Wayne Perkins, who added the solo on Concrete Jungle and the lead on Stir It Up. Released in April 1973, the album first came in a sleeve shaped like a Zippo lighter that flipped open on a hinge. It sold modestly at first, but critics loved it.[1] [2] [3]

In 1973 the band toured England, playing universities and clubs, and appeared on the BBC's The Old Grey Whistle Test. It was the last tour Bunny Wailer ever did with them. He hated the cold, struggled to find food that fit his strict Rastafarian diet, and refused to play what he called freak clubs. Joe Higgs, their old teacher, filled in on the American dates. In New York they played alongside a young Bruce Springsteen. Then they were booked to open for Sly and the Family Stone, and after about five shows they were dropped. Stranded in Las Vegas, they made their way to San Francisco and played a radio session to an enthusiastic audience.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Their second Island album, Burnin', came out in October 1973. It was angrier, opening with Get Up, Stand Up, written by Bob and Peter, and it included I Shot the Sheriff. Eric Clapton's guitarist George Terry played him the record, Clapton recorded the song, and in September 1974 his version went to number one in America. It put Bob's songwriting in front of a huge new audience. The Library of Congress later added Burnin' to its National Recording Registry. That same year, 1973, brought tragedy for Peter Tosh. A car driving on the wrong side of the road hit his, killing his girlfriend Evonne and fracturing his skull.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The original Wailers did not survive their success. Bunny and Peter felt Island was building the band around Bob, with more attention and money going his way, and a name that increasingly read Bob Marley and the Wailers. Peter took to calling Blackwell Chris Whiteworst. When Blackwell refused to release a Tosh solo album, both men left in 1974. There was no single dramatic split, and all three kept releasing records on their own Tuff Gong label in Jamaica. But the harmony trio from the Trenchtown yard was finished, and Bob would carry on with a new band.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Natty Dread, Live! and Rastaman Vibration

The new band kept the Barrett brothers at its heart, with Family Man as bandleader, arranger and co producer. Around them came guitarist Al Anderson, keyboard players Tyrone Downie and Earl Wya Lindo, and percussionist Alvin Seeco Patterson. Replacing the male harmonies of Peter and Bunny, Bob formed a trio of women called the I Threes, made up of Rita, Marcia Griffiths and Judy Mowatt. The name played on the Rastafarian idea of I and I, God within every person. Chris Blackwell also handed Bob the Island property at 56 Hope Road, in uptown Kingston. It became his home, his office, his rehearsal space and the headquarters of Tuff Gong.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Natty Dread, released in October 1974, was the first album without Tosh and Bunny. It opened with Lively Up Yourself and included Them Belly Full, Rebel Music and a gospel tinged song called No Woman, No Cry. The title is Jamaican patois for woman, don't cry, not a claim that life is better without women. The credits looked strange. No Woman, No Cry was credited to Vincent Ford, known as Tata, a Trenchtown friend who used a wheelchair and ran a soup kitchen. Bob was in a dispute with his old publisher, Cayman Music, and many believe he put new songs in the names of friends and family to keep them out of that contract.[1] [2] [3]

The real breakthrough came on stage. On the seventeenth and eighteenth of July 1975, the band played the Lyceum Theatre in London, recorded on the Rolling Stones' mobile studio. The version of No Woman, No Cry from the first night, slow and swaying, with the crowd singing along, was released as a single and reached number twenty two in Britain. It was Bob's first hit outside the reggae world. The Live! album followed in December. The photographer Kate Simon, who was there, said Bob was as good looking as Steve McQueen and fronted a band as tight as anything she had ever heard.[1] [2] [3]

Rastaman Vibration, released in April 1976, finally cracked America. It reached number eight on the Billboard album chart, and Roots, Rock, Reggae became the only Marley single ever to enter the Hot 100, peaking at fifty one. The album's heaviest moment was War, whose lyrics came almost word for word from a speech by Haile Selassie. Rolling Stone named Bob Marley and the Wailers its band of the year. That same year his old partners made their own statements. Peter Tosh released Legalize It, and Bunny released Blackheart Man, and many of the same musicians played on all three records.[1] [2] [3]

The shooting, Smile Jamaica and exile in London

By 1976 Jamaica was close to civil war. Prime Minister Michael Manley's People's National Party and Edward Seaga's Jamaica Labour Party both used armed gangs in the Kingston ghettos, and a state of emergency was declared in June. The government planned a free concert called Smile Jamaica to calm things down and asked Bob to headline. He insisted he was neutral, moved the show away from the prime minister's residence, and wrote a cheerful song for it. Then Manley called an early election for the fifteenth of December. To many in the opposition, the concert now looked like a rally for Manley, with Bob Marley as its star.[1] [2] [3]

On the evening of the third of December 1976, two days before the concert, gunmen burst into 56 Hope Road while the band was taking a break from rehearsal. Rita was shot in the head as she sat in her car in the driveway, and survived. Bob was hit in the chest and arm. His manager, Don Taylor, was shot several times and critically wounded. A band employee, Louis Griffiths, was also hit. Nobody died, which many people later called a miracle. The gunmen drove off, reportedly toward the Tivoli Gardens area of West Kingston, a stronghold of the Jamaica Labour Party.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Bob hid in the hills above Kingston at Strawberry Hill, a property of Chris Blackwell's. He promised to sing one song at Smile Jamaica. On the fifth of December he was driven to National Heroes Park, where about eighty thousand people waited, unsure he would come. Family Man Barrett was still in hiding, so Cat Coore of Third World played bass. Rita sang in the hospital gown she had been discharged in hours earlier. More than two hundred people crowded the stage, many acting as a human shield. Bob played for ninety minutes, and at one point rolled up his sleeve to show the crowd his wound. The bullet in his arm stayed there for the rest of his life.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Straight after the concert Bob left Jamaica, first for Nassau in the Bahamas, then London, where he stayed for well over a year. He lived at 42 Oakley Street in Chelsea and played football in Battersea Park. On the tenth of March 1977, he and Family Man were caught with cannabis in Ladbroke Grove, and Bob was later convicted and fined. In the studio, though, he was flying. Exodus, released in June 1977, took its title from his answer to Manley's slogan, We know where we're going. It held Natural Mystic, Jamming, Waiting in Vain, Three Little Birds and a new One Love, and it stayed on the British chart for fifty six weeks in a row.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In June 1977, Bob and the band played four famous nights at the Rainbow Theatre in London, filmed for a BBC documentary. A London raised guitarist, Junior Marvin, had joined in February and added a harder rock edge. The Exodus sessions also produced Kaya, a gentler record released in 1978, with Is This Love and Easy Skanking. Critics called it too soft, but it reached the British top five. Its video, shot at the Keskidee arts centre in London, gave a seven year old Naomi Campbell her first moment on camera. But something far more serious had begun. In July 1977, doctors found a melanoma under the nail of Bob's right big toe.[1] [2] [3] [4]

One Love, Survival and Africa

Bob's diagnosis was acral lentiginous melanoma, a type that grows in hidden places like the soles of the feet and under the nails, and the most common melanoma in people with dark skin. Doctors advised amputating the toe. He refused, citing his faith, and also fearing it would end his performing life. Instead the nail and nail bed were removed and covered with a skin graft from his thigh. He told few people how sick he might be, and kept planning tours. Meanwhile, back in Jamaica, two rival gunmen who had ended up in the same jail cell, Claudie Massop and Bucky Marshall, had an idea for peace.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Massop flew to London to persuade Bob to come home, and on the twenty second of April 1978 he headlined the One Love Peace Concert at the National Stadium in Kingston, before more than thirty two thousand people. Peter Tosh played too, lit a spliff on stage and lectured Manley and Seaga, who were sitting right in front of him, for refusing to legalise cannabis. Bob came on after midnight. During Jamming, he called both leaders up, and held their hands together above his head. It was an extraordinary image. Sadly it changed little. Massop and Marshall were both killed within two years, and the 1980 election brought hundreds of murders. Tosh paid for his speech too. That September police arrested him in Half Way Tree, and he said they beat him so badly his hand was broken.[1] [2] [3]

In June 1978 the United Nations gave Bob its Peace Medal of the Third World. At the end of that year he finally went to Africa, visiting Kenya and Ethiopia, where he stayed at Shashamane, the settlement on land Haile Selassie had granted to Rastafarians. Songs written there fed into Survival, released in 1979, his most militant album, with Africa Unite, Zimbabwe and Wake Up and Live. It was nearly called Black Survival. He played the Amandla Festival in Boston against apartheid. And in January 1980 he played his first shows in Africa, in Libreville, Gabon, where he began a relationship with Pascaline Bongo, the president's daughter.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Gabon also ended a partnership. Bob discovered that his manager, Don Taylor, had overcharged for the concerts and kept the difference, and he parted ways with him. Then came the proudest gig of his life. Zimbabwe, the former white ruled Rhodesia, won its independence in April 1980, and Bob was invited to play at the ceremony at Rufaro Stadium in Salisbury, now Harare. According to reports, he paid his own way. As the new flag went up, crowds outside broke through the gates and police fired tear gas. The band fled the stage, but Bob came back to finish. The next night he played a free show for a huge crowd.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

Uprising and the final year

Uprising came out in June 1980. It is one of his most openly spiritual records, with Forever Loving Jah and Could You Be Loved, a reggae and disco hybrid written on a plane that became a top five hit in Britain. It closes with Redemption Song, just Bob and an acoustic guitar. Some of its key lines come from a speech by the Pan African leader Marcus Garvey, about emancipating ourselves from mental slavery. Rita later said Bob was already in secret pain and facing his own mortality, and that you can hear it in that song. He first performed it live in Zurich on the thirtieth of May 1980, opening the Uprising Tour.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The European tour was the biggest of his life. In Milan he played to around one hundred thousand people at the San Siro stadium, and his last outdoor show was at Dalymount Park in Dublin on the sixth of July 1980. Then the band flew to America and played two nights at Madison Square Garden. On the twenty first of September 1980, Bob collapsed while jogging in Central Park. Tests showed the cancer had spread to his brain, lungs and liver. Two days later, he still went on stage at the Stanley Theatre in Pittsburgh, and played a long, three encore show. The last song he ever performed live was Get Up, Stand Up.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The rest of the tour was cancelled. Bob went for treatment in New York and Miami, and on the fourth of November 1980 he was baptised into the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, taking the name Berhane Selassie. Later he went to the clinic of Josef Issels in Bavaria, Germany. Issels offered an alternative cancer therapy that the medical establishment considered unproven, and he had once been charged with fraud and manslaughter. Bob spent months there, growing weaker. In 1981 Jamaica awarded him its Order of Merit. From Germany he asked that his baby son with Cindy Breakspeare have the spelling of his name changed from Damien to Damian.[1] [2] [3] [4]

By May 1981 the treatment had failed. Bob boarded a plane for Jamaica, wanting to die at home, but his condition worsened in the air and the flight was diverted to Miami. He died at Cedars of Lebanon Hospital on the eleventh of May 1981, aged thirty six. His mother Cedella was with him. His last words to his son Ziggy were reported as, on your way up, take me up, on your way down, don't let me down. On the twenty first of May Jamaica gave him a state funeral, blending Ethiopian Orthodox and Rastafari traditions. Both Edward Seaga and Michael Manley came. Prime Minister Seaga delivered the eulogy.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Crowds lined the roads as the procession wound from Kingston into the hills of Saint Ann. Bob was laid to rest in a small chapel at Nine Mile, near where he was born. In his casket were his red Gibson Les Paul guitar, a Bible opened at the twenty third psalm, and a stalk of cannabis placed there by Rita. Ziggy and Stephen had sung with the Wailers and the I Threes at the service. Today the mausoleum at Nine Mile holds Bob and, beside him, his mother Cedella, who died in 2008. Rita turned 56 Hope Road into the Bob Marley Museum in 1986.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Legend, lawsuits and a trail of violence

In May 1983, Island released Confrontation, built from demos and unreleased tracks, with the I Threes added to smooth the sound. It gave the world Buffalo Soldier, a top ten hit in Britain. A year later, on the seventh of May 1984, came Legend, a greatest hits album compiled by Dave Robinson. He later admitted it was designed to sell to a mainly white, suburban audience, leaving out the angrier songs. It went to number one in Britain and never really left the charts. It is the best selling reggae album of all time, certified eighteen times platinum in the United States, with tens of millions sold worldwide.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Bob died without a will, and his estate, worth tens of millions of dollars, became a legal battlefield. Rita was accused of helping to siphon money out of it. In court it emerged that the estate's lawyer, David Steinberg, and accountant, Marvin Zolt, had drawn up backdated documents, and that Rita had signed Bob's name on some of them. In 1992 a federal jury cleared Rita of responsibility but found that the lawyer and the accountant had committed fraud. Other fights followed for decades, over songwriting credits, publishing and royalties, with Danny Sims and later with members of the band.[1] [2] [3]

Nineteen eighty seven was a terrible year for the Wailers. On the seventeenth of April, drummer Carlton Barrett was shot dead outside his home in Kingston, aged thirty six. His widow, Albertine, was later convicted of conspiracy to murder, along with her lover, the taxi driver Glenroy Carter, and the man said to have fired the shot, Junior Neil. Then, on the eleventh of September, a gang led by Dennis Lobban, a man Peter Tosh had tried to help after a long prison term, held Tosh and his friends at his house for hours, demanding money. They shot Tosh twice in the head. Two others, the herbalist Wilton Doc Brown and the disc jockey Free I, also died.[1] [2] [3]

Lobban was convicted and sentenced to hang, and his sentence was later commuted. The killing ended a planned Wailers reunion that Bunny and Junior Braithwaite had been working on. Braithwaite himself was shot dead in Kingston in June 1999. The violence reached Bob's own family too. In 1990 his half brother Anthony Booker was killed in a shootout with Miami police after opening fire with a shotgun in a shopping mall. And in December 2022, his grandson Jo Mersa Marley, a singer and Stephen's son, died suddenly in Florida at thirty one, of an acute asthma attack. He was buried at Nine Mile beside his grandfather.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In January 2005, Rita announced a plan to exhume Bob's body and rebury it in Ethiopia, which she called his spiritual resting place. Jamaicans were outraged, including many Rastafarians, and the family soon said Jamaica would stay his resting place. The band's own fights went on. In 2006 Family Man Barrett sued Island Records and the Marley family for sixty million pounds in royalties, but the court ruled he had signed away those rights in a 1994 settlement, and he faced huge legal costs. Rita, meanwhile, had caused a storm in 2004 when she said in interviews for her memoir that Bob had once forced himself on her in 1973. She later said the tabloids had exaggerated her words.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The family, the band and the legacy

Music ran on in the next generation. Ziggy, Stephen, Sharon and Cedella had formed the Melody Makers as children in 1979, with a song their father wrote for them. Ziggy Marley and the Melody Makers went on to win Grammys, and Ziggy has since won eight in all. Stephen became a Grammy winning producer. Damian, known as Junior Gong, won the Best Reggae Album Grammy for Halfway Tree and scored a worldwide hit with Welcome to Jamrock in 2005. Julian and Ky Mani also make music, and the brothers toured together in 2024 for the first time in two decades. Bob's official website recognises eleven children.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The surviving Wailers kept the name alive, and gradually passed on. Family Man Barrett led the Wailers Band for decades, and Junior Marvin and Al Anderson formed their own version in 2008. Joe Higgs died in 1999. Earl Lindo died in 2017. Bunny Wailer, who won three reggae Grammys and wrote Electric Boogie for Marcia Griffiths, died on the second of March 2021, after a stroke, at seventy three. Lee Scratch Perry died that August. Tyrone Downie died in 2022, and Family Man Barrett died on the third of February 2024, aged seventy seven. Beverley Kelso, who joined at fourteen, is the last surviving founding member of the Wailers, as of 2026.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10]

The honours kept coming. Bob was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1994. In 1999 Time magazine named Exodus the album of the century, and the BBC later named One Love its song of the millennium. He received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award and a Hollywood star in 2001. Rolling Stone ranked him eleventh among the greatest artists of all time. His story has been retold many times, in Kevin Macdonald's documentary Marley in 2012, in Marlon James's Booker Prize winning novel about the shooting, A Brief History of Seven Killings, and in the London stage musical Get Up, Stand Up.[1] [2] [3]

In 2024 came the biopic Bob Marley: One Love, with Kingsley Ben Adir as Bob and Lashana Lynch as Rita, produced with Ziggy's involvement. It took around one hundred and eighty one million dollars worldwide. In February 2025, his eightieth birthday was celebrated under the theme Uprising, with fans travelling from as far as Switzerland and Ireland to 56 Hope Road. And Legend just keeps going. As of September 2026, it has spent more than nine hundred and fifty weeks on the Billboard album chart, a mark only Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon had reached before it. Its highest American position, number five, came in 2014, thirty years after release.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

The people around Bob Marley

Bob Marley and Peter Tosh. They met in Joe Higgs's yard, and Peter taught the others to play. He co wrote Get Up, Stand Up and wrote classics like Four Hundred Years, but felt Island built everything around Bob. He left in 1974, bitter at Blackwell. They stayed connected, sharing stages and records, and according to Ben Harper, Peter once walked on unannounced at a 1978 show and took Bob's microphone for Get Up, Stand Up. Tosh was murdered in 1987.[1] [2] [3]

Bob Marley and Bunny Wailer. Childhood friends from Nine Mile, they later shared a house in Trenchtown and a little sister, because Bob's mother had a daughter with Bunny's father. Bunny brought gospel and Curtis Mayfield harmony to the Wailers. He quit touring in 1973 over cold, food and freak clubs, and left the band in 1974, yet recorded tributes to Bob that won him Grammys. He outlived all the other core members, dying in 2021.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Bob Marley and Rita Marley. Rita led the Soulettes at Studio One and married Bob in February 1966. She brought him toward Rastafari after seeing Haile Selassie, sang in the I Threes, and survived a bullet in the 1976 shooting. The marriage was strained by his many affairs and children with other women, and in 2004 she accused him of once forcing himself on her. After his death she ran his businesses and founded the Bob Marley Museum.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Bob Marley and Chris Blackwell. The founder of Island Records gave the stranded Wailers four thousand pounds in 1972 without a contract, then reshaped Catch a Fire for rock audiences. He gave Bob the use of 56 Hope Road and sheltered him at Strawberry Hill after the shooting. Peter Tosh called him Chris Whiteworst, blaming him for splitting the band. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame calls Blackwell the person most responsible for turning the world on to reggae.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Bob Marley and Lee Scratch Perry. Perry had lost interest in singers until Bob persuaded him, and in 1970 and 1971 they made Soul Rebels and Soul Revolution with the Upsetters. They split over who owned the recordings, and the row flared again in 1974 when Perry licensed the songs to Trojan in Britain. Still, they kept working together, and Punky Reggae Party came out partly on Perry's Black Art label in 1977.[1] [2] [3]

Bob Marley and Cindy Breakspeare. Cindy Breakspeare was crowned Miss World in November 1976, weeks before the shooting, and her affair with Bob lasted from 1976 to 1980, while he was still married to Rita. Their son Damian was born in 1978. Two months after Bob died she married a Jamaican senator. In 2024 a birthday tribute she posted about their romance caused a public backlash from fans who sided with Rita.[1] [2]

Bob Marley and Aston Family Man Barrett. Family Man, with his brother Carlton on drums, came over from the Upsetters and became the Wailers' bandleader, arranger and co producer, the man behind the famous bass sound. He named himself Family Man before he had any children, and later claimed forty one. After Bob's death he led the Wailers Band, then lost a sixty million pound royalty case against Island and the Marley family in 2006. He died in 2024.[1] [2] [3]

Bob Marley and Don Taylor. Don Taylor managed Bob during his rise in the mid seventies and was shot several times and critically wounded in the 1976 shooting. He later told the story that he and Bob watched the gunmen tried and killed by a ghetto court. In January 1980, in Gabon, Bob learned Taylor had overcharged for the concerts and pocketed the difference, and parted ways with him.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Bob Marley and Johnny Nash and Danny Sims. The American singer Johnny Nash and his manager Danny Sims signed the Wailers in the late sixties to their JAD label and Cayman Music publishing for a small weekly wage. Nash had big hits with Bob's songs, including Stir It Up, and took him to Sweden and on tour in Britain. But the contract haunted Bob for years, and Sims later sued over songs credited to friends, losing in 1987.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Bob Marley and Joe Higgs. Joe Higgs ran free music lessons in his Trenchtown yard, taught the young Wailers harmony and voice technique, and gave Bob guitar lessons. He introduced them to Coxsone Dodd in 1963, and in 1973 filled in for Bunny Wailer on the American tour. Bob said Higgs taught him many things. Jimmy Cliff called Higgs the father of reggae.[1] [2]

Bob Marley and Michael Manley and Edward Seaga. The two rival leaders of Jamaica's violent politics both wanted Bob on their side. Smile Jamaica, planned by Manley's government, looked like a Manley rally once he called an early election, and the gunmen who shot Bob were linked to Seaga's party. At the One Love Peace Concert in 1978, Bob joined their hands on stage. In 1981 Seaga, then prime minister, gave the eulogy at his funeral.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Rare facts about Bob Marley

• His father, Norval Marley, called himself Captain, but he had only ever been a private in the British Army. Norval was a white Englishman from Crowborough in Sussex, about sixty when Bob was born. He gave the family little support and rarely visited, and he died when Bob was ten.[1]
• In Delaware in 1966, Bob worked at a Chrysler plant under the name Donald Marley. Shortly after marrying Rita, he moved to Wilmington, where his mother lived. He worked as a DuPont lab assistant and on a Chrysler assembly line and forklift in nearby Newark.[1]
• Bob owned two BMWs and said he chose the brand because BMW stood for Bob Marley and the Wailers. According to accounts of his life, he owned a BMW 1602 and later a BMW 2500. The joke about the initials was his own reason for buying them.[1]
• He supported Tottenham Hotspur, as well as the Brazilian club Santos and its star Pele. Football ran through his whole life. He made Jamaican international Allan Skill Cole his tour manager and once said that to know him you had to play football against him and the Wailers.[1]
• Supermodel Naomi Campbell made her first screen appearance, aged seven, in the video for Is This Love. The 1978 video was filmed at the Keskidee centre, a black led arts centre in London. Campbell was one of the children who performed in it.[1] [2]
• A long haired marine spider on the Great Barrier Reef is named after Bob: Desis bobmarleyi. Queensland Museum scientists named it in 2017 after hearing his song High Tide or Low Tide during fieldwork. The spider survives high tides by trapping air bubbles among its hairs.[1]
• Only the first twenty thousand copies of Catch a Fire came in the Zippo lighter sleeve, because each one had to be hand riveted. The hinged sleeve opened like a real lighter. Later pressings used a photo of Bob by Esther Anderson, and Jamaican police later raided her home and seized her photos and film.[1]
• Peter Tosh said in an interview that he hated Simmer Down, the Wailers' first number one. The song told Kingston's rude boys to cool their tempers and topped the Jamaican chart in February 1964, but Tosh never warmed to it.[1]
• The dancing man in the 2 Tone Records logo was based on a 1964 photo of Peter Tosh. The figure, nicknamed Walt Jabsco, later inspired a Webdings character that became the levitating man in a business suit emoji. Tosh's children have praised it.[1]
• Peter Tosh liked to ride onto stage on a unicycle, riding forwards and backwards. He took up unicycling after leaving the Wailers. He also played a custom guitar shaped like an M16 rifle, given to him by a fan in Los Angeles in 1983.[1]
• Carlton Barrett built his first drum kit out of empty paint cans he found in the street. His brother Aston built his first bass guitar from scratch. Together they became the most famous rhythm section in reggae, and Carlton is credited with popularising the one drop rhythm.[1] [2]
• Aston Barrett called himself Family Man before he had children, then claimed forty one of them. He said he had twenty three daughters and eighteen sons. The nickname came from seeing himself as the band's leader and father figure.[1]
• Joe Higgs, the Wailers' teacher, replaced Bunny Wailer on the band's 1973 American tour. When Bunny refused to tour again, Tosh and Marley asked Higgs. It meant their old harmony coach was on stage with them in New York and on the Sly Stone dates.[1] [2]
• Johnny Nash signed Bob, Bunny, Peter and Rita to his publishing company for about fifty Jamaican dollars a week. It happened around 1967 or 1968, after Nash saw them at a Rastafarian gathering. The deal with Cayman Music later led Bob to credit songs to friends.[1]
• Roots, Rock, Reggae, peaking at fifty one, was the only Marley single ever to enter the Billboard Hot 100. It came from Rastaman Vibration in 1976, his first American top ten album. His best known songs were never American pop hits in his lifetime.[1]
• Punky Reggae Party once also namechecked the punk band the Slits, but the mention was allegedly dropped. Bob wrote the song in 1977 in response to the Clash covering Police and Thieves. It lists the Damned, the Jam, the Clash, the Maytals and Dr Feelgood.[1]
• Paul McCartney makes a cameo in the 1984 video for One Love. The video, directed by Don Letts to promote Legend, follows a young boy dancing along the King's Road. It also features Madness, Bananarama and Aswad members.[1]
• Could You Be Loved quotes Bob's very first single, Judge Not, from 1962. In the middle of the song, the backing singers sing a verse from Judge Not about the rocky road of life. In 2025 King Charles chose it as the first track on his Apple Music radio show.[1]
• Survival was originally going to be called Black Survival. The title was shortened to avoid the theme being misread. The album was partly censored in apartheid South Africa.[1]
• The original Babylon by Bus sleeve had cut out bus windows, so you could choose what scene to show through them. The 1978 double live album, mostly recorded in Paris, came with an inner sleeve offering four different views.[1]
• In June 1978 the United Nations gave Bob its Peace Medal of the Third World. It was presented in New York, about two months after the One Love Peace Concert in Kingston.[1] [2]
• Bob was buried with his red Gibson Les Paul, a Bible open at the twenty third psalm, and a stalk of cannabis. The cannabis was placed by his widow Rita. He lies in a marble mausoleum inside a small Ethiopian style chapel at Nine Mile, his birthplace.[1] [2]
• Bob asked, from his German clinic, that his son's name be spelled Damian instead of Damien. He had seen the horror film Damien: Omen II and felt the name was wrong for a Rastafarian's child. Damian was two when his father died.[1]
• The Rasta elder who guided Bob into the faith, Mortimer Planno, calmed the huge crowd at Haile Selassie's arrival in 1966. Planno, born in Cuba, had met the emperor in Ethiopia in 1961 as part of a Jamaican delegation. He became Bob's teacher and friend.[1]
• Bunny Wailer wrote Electric Boogie, the song behind the Electric Slide line dance. He wrote it in 1982 for fellow Wailers singer Marcia Griffiths. A 1989 remix turned it into an international dance craze.[1] [2]
• After the 1976 shooting, Bob recovered at Strawberry Hill, Chris Blackwell's property in the Blue Mountains. The estate is now part of Blackwell's Island Outpost group of hotels in Jamaica.[1]
• The bullet that hit Bob's arm in 1976 was never removed. Doctors warned that taking it out could affect the use of his fingers, so he carried it until his death in 1981.[1]
• Legend reached its highest American chart position, number five, in 2014, thirty years after it came out. It never topped the Billboard album chart, but by 2026 it had spent more than nine hundred and fifty weeks there.[1] [2]
• The last song Bob ever performed on stage was Get Up, Stand Up, in Pittsburgh. The show at the Stanley Theatre on the twenty third of September 1980 had three encores. A recording was later released as Live Forever.[1] [2]
• An unreleased film of the Smile Jamaica concert was made by Carl Colby, son of former CIA director William Colby. The detail later fed conspiracy theories about the CIA and Bob's death, which have no supporting evidence.[1] [2]
• A green plaque marks the Battersea Park pitches where Bob and his band played football. Wandsworth council and the Nubian Jak Community Trust unveiled it in October 2025. He also has a blue plaque at his first London home, Ridgmount Gardens in Bloomsbury.[1]
• Rita Marley's birth in Cuba has been questioned, including by Bob's mother. Rita says she was told she was born in Santiago de Cuba, but never traced it. A visa application once failed after officials decided she was not Cuban born.[1]
• In the book Marley and Me, the famous dog got his name when Is This Love came on the tape deck. Author John Grogan and his wife were arguing about names when she pressed play, and Bob's song decided it.[1]
• Beverley Kelso joined the Wailers at fourteen and sang on about two dozen of their early songs. She left in 1965 and moved to the United States in 1979. As of 2026 she is the last surviving founding member of the group.[1] [2]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.