The Unique Oral History of Bob Marley - Part 1

If one loves reading biographies, the 2017 book called So Much Things to Say: The Oral History of Bob Marley by Roger Steffens is a unique book that tells tales known and unrevealed about the reggae King.

UK reggae dub poet artist Linton Kwesi Johnson describes Steffens as writer, broadcaster and photographer, a respected scholar of reggae and renowned archivist specializing in Bob Marley recordings and ephemera in his introduction to the 340-page book.

What is unique about the book is that for close to forty years, Steffens talked to scores of his friends, associates and family members who shared with him intimate details of their interactions with the Reggae King which is presented in the book in verbatim.

In the introduction titled The People Speak, Johnson says in an essay that he wrote on the lyrics of Bob Marley’s Exodus, which was voted album of the twentieth century by Time magazine, he said of his lyrical genius that it was based on his “ability to translate the personal into the political, the private into the public, the particular into the universal. And when you read through the book, this is the experience that never goes away.

I agree with Johnson that what indeed makes Steffens’s book ‘unique is that the author does not present a portrait of the artist through his own lens but instead presents us with a collage of impressions seen through the eyes of others’.

Johnson acknowledges that for many years, Steffens has travelled the world telling Marley’s story with his illustrated “Life of Bob Marley” lecture but in the book he allows those who knew Marley to give their versions through the seventy-five interviews with people close to Marley who speak candidly about what they witnessed of the singer’s life and times which he put together in form of the book.

The book has Bob Marley’s mother Cedella, wife Rita, childhood friends including Peter Tosh and Bunny Wailer who were part of the original Wailers Band speaking out about Bob Marley.

It also has some heart touching revelations. Take for example the parts that talks about Bob’s childhood.

Steffens write that Bob’s earliest years were filled with neglect and rejection by both races. Whites thought of him as a black child; blacks, critical of mixed-race children, taunted him as “the little yellow boy.” Even his revered great-grandmother, known as Ya Ya, referred to him as “the German boy.”

The book also reveals that ‘Bob’s mother entered into an on-again, off-again relationship with Bunny’s father, Thaddeus “Toddy” Livingston. Their affair produced a daughter named Pearl, sister to Bunny and Bob, born in 1964’.

Steffens explains about Trench Town in Kingston Jamaica where Bob grew up which was known as a ghetto and it was difficult for people from there to find jobs once potential employers discovered their address.

Steffens writes in the book that among the only ways that law-abiding people were able to escape were through sports or music, and the area was known as an incubator of great talents in both fields.

Now, one of the most important was Joe Higgs, widely regarded as “the father of reggae” who was among the earliest of Jamaica’s recording artists, who became Bob Marley’s most significant mentor. Steffens writes in the book that Higgs not only coached Bob; he was a musical teacher and guide to a host of other Jamaican artists, including superstars from the earliest days of ska and rocksteady, the predecessors of reggae.

Before his passing in 1999, he lived in Los Angeles. Steffens says he worked with him throughout the late nineties on his never-completed autobiography, from which his quotes in this book are taken.

Higgs is quoted as saying: ‘When Bunny and Bob were growing up together, Bob was not treated as one of the family. He was like an outcast in the house. His mother today comes with this legacy, as if she were there. Bob was sent to learn welding, while Bunny was sent to school. Toddy didn’t put any money into Bob’s corner. The mother, Cedella, wouldn’t allow anybody to know he was her son. One day he was holding tightly to her, and she box him away. He slept beneath the bottom of the house.’

His step brother Bunny Wailer agrees: ‘Bob was a wild child. He was like the ugly duckling. He had to find his own little brush to pick, and his own little cornmeal. Nobody wanted him around their corn, so he gets what’s left. He just had to survive. His most serious endeavour was just to eat and drink. There were many nights of cold ground for his bed and rock stone for his pillow. Countless nights. Bob was not a child who get anything that he sought. He didn’t get what any other child got’.