The Trench Town Origin

He was born Robert Nesta Marley on February 6, 1945, in Nine Mile, Saint Ann Parish, Jamaica, the son of a Jamaican-born British-Army-quartermaster father named Norval Marley and a young Black Jamaican mother named Cedella Booker. He met Bunny Wailer in primary school and Peter Tosh at the singer Joe Higgs's vocal-coaching sessions on Studio One Lane in Kingston in 1963. The Wailers formed that year. They recorded Simmer Down in February 1964 — their first Jamaican number one. Catch a Fire came out on Island Records in 1973 — the first international reggae album. He survived an assassination attempt at his Hope Road home in Kingston on December 3, 1976, two days before the Smile Jamaica concert. He died of metastatic melanoma at the Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in Miami on May 11, 1981, at thirty-six.

Sandile Mokoena's biography opens earlier and follows the arc through the Nine Mile childhood and the long Trench Town years, the Studio One sessions with Coxsone Dodd, the 1966 Cedella Booker emigration to Wilmington, Delaware, the 1966 marriage to Rita Anderson, the 1967 Rastafari conversion, the Wailers Island years and the long Chris Blackwell collaboration, the Burnin' and Natty Dread and Rastaman Vibration albums, the 1976 Hope Road shooting and the 1978 One Love Peace Concert at the National Stadium, the 1980 Madison Square Garden collapse, the long Bavarian Cancer Centre treatment, the May 11 Miami death, and the long Tuff Gong recording studio infrastructure his family has continued.

What emerges is a portrait of the Jamaican Rasta singer whose ten Wailers and solo studio albums made reggae the most consequential post-1970 export of the global South — and whose body the cancer killed at thirty-six.