Robert Nesta Marley was born on February 6, 1945, in Nine Mile, a small village in Saint Ann Parish in the Jamaican hills, to Norval Sinclair Marley, a sixty-year-old white Jamaican plantation overseer, and Cedella Booker, an eighteen-year-old Black Jamaican woman. His father died when Bob was ten. He moved to Kingston as a teenager, settling in the Trenchtown government housing development โ a community of extreme poverty and gang violence that became simultaneously the hardest school of his life and the primary subject of his art. He began playing music in Trenchtown with Peter Tosh and Bunny Wailer, forming the group that would become The Wailers.
The Wailers' early recordings worked through ska and rocksteady before settling into reggae's slower pulse. His 1966 visit to Ethiopia โ inspired by his growing Rastafari faith โ and his marriage to Rita Anderson strengthened both his religious conviction and his musical vision. They signed with Island Records in 1972; Catch a Fire and Burnin' (both 1973) brought international attention. When Peter Tosh and Bunny Wailer left for solo careers, Marley continued under the name Bob Marley and the Wailers, and the 1975โ1980 period produced the body of work for which he is remembered.
Exodus (1977) โ recorded in London after a 1976 assassination attempt on Marley at his Kingston home โ was named by Time magazine as the greatest album of the twentieth century. 'One Love,' 'Three Little Birds,' 'Exodus,' and 'Jamming' achieved a warmth, musical sophistication, and spiritual depth that remains unequaled in the history of reggae. His performances were always in service of his Rastafari theology โ the conviction that Babylon (the system of oppression, materialism, and false religion) must be resisted and that African liberation was a spiritual necessity.
Marley died on May 11, 1981, at the age of thirty-six, from melanoma that had spread to his brain โ he had refused amputation of the affected toe for religious reasons. His INFP quality is the emotional authenticity that runs through every recording: he did not make music about Rastafari or Jamaica or liberation; he made music that was those things, that emerged from his deepest personal convictions without calculation about commercial reception. 'Redemption Song' โ performed with only his acoustic guitar, asking whether we can free ourselves from the mental slavery that is the truest form of captivity โ is the INFP's most complete artistic statement.
