Bob Marley was born on February 6, 1945 in Rhoden Hall, in the north of Jamaica. His mother was an eighteen-year-old black girl called Cedella Booker, whereas his father was Captain Norval Marley, a fifty-year-old white quatermaster attached to the British West Indian Regiment. Bob grew up in the rural surroundings of St Ann to the north of the island. In the late sixties, he moved to Trenchtown, in the suburbs of Kingston. When Bob quit school, he seemed to have but one ambition : music.
rnHe made his first record "Judge not" in 1962. In 1963, he formed "The Wailings Wailers" with his friends Bunny and Peter Tosh. Clement Dodd auditioned the group and, pleased with the results, agreed to record them. The Wailing Wailers released their first single "Simmer down" under the Coxson Label during the last week of 1963. By the following January it was number one in the Jamaican charts, a position it held for the next two months. The group (Bob, Bunny, and Peter together with Junior Braithwaile and Chery Smith) were big news.
rnBob 's mother later remarried and moved to Delaware in the United States where she had saved sufficient money to send her son an air ticket. But before he moved to America in 1966, Bob met a young girl called Rita Anderson and, on February 10,1966, they were married.
rnHe only stayed eight months in America. When he came back to Jamaica, Marley joined up with Bunny and Peter to re-form the group, now known as "The Wailers". The group came into conflict with Coxson Dodd and, determined to control their own destiny, formed their own record label "Wail'N'Soul". But despite a few early successes, the Wailer's business naivete proved too much and the label folded in late 1967.
rnThe group survived, however, initially as songwriters for a company associated with the American singer Johnny Nash who, the following decade, was to have an international smash with Marley's "Stir it up". The Wailers also met up with Lee Perry, whose production genius had transformed recording studio techniques into an art form. The Perry/Wailers combinaison resulted in some of the finest music the band ever made. Such tracks as "Soul Rebel", "Duppy Conqueror", "400 years" and "Small Axe" were not only classics, but they defined the future direction of Reggae.