Bob Marley’s 80th birthday – a tribute
Story By: Olive Gibbon
I assume that you have seen a Bob Marley face in a tro-tro countless times: on doors, dashboards, or windscreens. A glimpse of a familiar man, such familiar songs, but a musician whose life and body of work perhaps deserves another thought this week.
Yesterday, Thursday 6th February, would have marked the 80th birthday of Bob Marley, the iconic musician known for his rocksteady and reggae tracks.
The band Bob Marley and the Wailers is most known for the album ‘Legend’ released in 1984, which features iconic songs like ‘No Woman, No Cry’, ‘Is This Love’, ‘Could You Be Loved’, ‘Three Little Birds’, and ‘Jamming’. This album was released three years after Marley’s death in 1981.
But some see the ‘Legend’ album of Bob Marley and the Wailers as Chris Blackwell’s design to propel them as a black rock group that could break into America in the 1970s. They’d find the band’s most sublime sound in earlier work, having formed in 1963, when Marley was just a teenager.
Bob Marley ranks as one of the best-selling music artists of all time, with estimated sales of more than 75 million records worldwide. In 1978, He was awarded a peace medal by the United Nations for a commitment to peace and justice. He performed at the ‘One Love Peace’ concert in Jamaica at a time of political unrest. His music appeals to people all over the world, with an accessibility and beautiful simplicity of message, that so many reach for.
Skin cancer tragically took Marley’s life at just 36 years old.
But Bob Marley, I am sure, lives on today. He is everywhere. And as a visitor to Accra it has been fascinating to see the Bob Marley stickers you find in nearly every tro-tro, many carrying a mini flag or small poster of the legend like some kind of makeshift shrine. When a song of his comes on, you will always witness head nodding to the beat that commuters cannot resist, too pronounced to simply be the tro-tro’s violent bounces and throws. To travel nearly 5000 miles, and find Bob Marley’s golden, gleaming energy of his music immortalised and respected in just the same way as home, has been thrilling. It can only reaffirm music as that special universal language, transcending boundaries and borders, that all blood can feel, and all souls can submit to.
