Bob Marley
The son of a white overseer and a village girl from the Jamaican uplands, raised in the slums of Kingston’s Trenchtown. With the Wailers he went from ska through rocksteady to reggae, and with “Catch a Fire” and “Exodus” reggae stopped being local music. Rasta gave his songs their language — Babylon, exodus, Zion — and to Jamaica he was more than a singer: in 1976 he was shot at in his own house on the eve of a concert and went on stage two days later with his arm in a sling, and in 1978, at the One Love Peace Concert, he joined the hands of two warring politicians. He died of melanoma in 1981 at thirty-six; “Legend” is still the best-selling reggae album there is.
He was born in the village of Nine Mile in Jamaica on 6 February 1945 at 02:30 local time. The hour comes from his mother — the village register kept no such precision.