Night Beat Post 167 - Bob Marley Part II: Trenchtown

Bob Marley’s mother, Cedella, was worried that her son had grown too comfortable with ghetto life and was too close to the Rude Boys. It was all too risky– there were frequent fights, even stabbings, in Trenchtown’s streets and at the ska dances.

Marley, though small and slight, was known as a force in Trenchtown. He even had a street name: Tuff Gong. But he had no aspiration for a criminal life. “Don’t worry,” he told his mother. “I don’t work for them.” The truth was, Marley found qualities of ruthless honesty, courage and rough beauty in the tenement yard community, and he didn’t necessarily want to transcend or escape it – instead, he wanted to describe its reality and to speak for its populace, which was subject not only to destitution, but to easy condemnation as well. Marley also didn’t like to see poor people killing other poor people as an effect of surviving in society’s margins. He had already written a song about cheap moralism, “Judge Not,” and recorded it with one of King…