Читать книгу Bob Marley: The Untold Story - Chris Salewicz, Chris Salewicz - Страница 10

On 6 August 1962, Jamaica was granted independence from British colonial rule. A by-product of independence for Trench Town’s population was that a sewage system was almost immediately installed. Two songs that year summed up the optimistic mood of an emergent nation: Lord Creator’s ‘Independent Jamaica’ and ‘Forward March’ by Derrick Morgan. Morgan recorded for the Beverley’s label, owned by a Chinese Jamaican businessman called Leslie Kong who ran Beverley’s Record and Ice Cream Parlor (which also sold stationery) on the corner of North and Orange Street in downtown Kingston. Upstairs, past the seated restaurant area, past the cigarette machine, was where Leslie Kong had his office. Kong had started the label after Morgan had sought finance for the recording of a tune called ‘Dearest Beverley’ which Jimmy Cliff had written, its title shrewdly bearing the same name as Kong’s wife – hence the name of the recording venture. At one stage in 1961, Morgan had seven records in the Jamaican Top Ten; one of the reasons he recorded so prolifically was that Kong only made a flat payment of ten Jamaican dollars per tune. Morgan also, however, had a role as an unofficial talent scout for the Beverley’s label.

In those days, Morgan would drink at a bar on Charles Street by the junction with Spanish Town Road – then known as Back-a-Wall, the area is now notorious as the JLP ‘garrison community’ of Tivoli Gardens.

On Charles Street lived a girlfriend of Morgan’s called Pat Stewart. She was acquainted with an aunt of Nesta’s, a ‘brown woman’, and when the youth visited her one time, Pat heard him sing. ‘Bob can sing good, y’know, Derrick – why not try ’im?’ she suggested.

‘You really do singin’, baas?’ Morgan checked with him in February 1962. The answer came in the affirmative. ‘Me seh well come over Beverley’s nuh: mek me hear you. And ’im come up deh one day and I play the piano and ’im sing the tune “Judge Not”.’

Two or three days later, Nesta turned up at Beverley’s, accompanied by his friend Jimmy Cliff, who was already recording on the label. Morgan thought the youth’s song was good but not great. And he was struck by the fact that Bob seemed to dance almost better than he sang when he auditioned the tune: ‘’im could DANCE.’ Finding himself one night in Cedella’s rum shop, Morgan complimented the boy’s mother on her son’s abilities. ‘You have a son who’s very talented,’ he told her. ‘He has a lot of potential.’

Jimmy Cliff, who lived by the bridge near Queen’s Theatre, recalled a slightly different version of the genesis of the first recording by Bob Marley: ‘Desmond came to me and I introduced him to Leslie Kong, and he got his song recorded. He then went and told Bob, “I know this youth called Jimmy Cliff, and he helped me to get my song recorded.” He then brought Bob to me, and I introduced him to Leslie Kong. And Bob had his song recorded. So that was the first recordings, so it meant a lot. Your first song, it really means a lot.’

Leslie Kong was willing to take a chance. ‘Alright,’ he decreed, ‘mi could try it now.’ The next Saturday morning, Kong drove down to Trench Town and turned up on the doorstep at 19 Second Street, looking for Nesta. His mother told him her son had gone out. Leslie Kong was disappointed: he wanted to offer him a recording contract, he said. But when Nesta came home in the early evening, he had managed to run into Kong, signed the contract, and been paid the five pounds it specified. Generously, a precursor of his later attitude towards finances, the youth gave two pounds to his mother, ten shillings to his aunt Enid, and five shillings to a woman who was visiting from the country.

‘Judge Not’ was recorded at Federal Studios the same month. Bob took Bunny along with him for moral support. ‘Judge Not’ was the joyous gallop of ska, a music at the time as fresh and unique as the nation of Jamaica itself, which the shrill, youthful voice of Bob Marley had as the backbeat to his first recorded work. But the celebratory sound of ‘Judge Not’ could not conceal the biblical tone that was significantly present in his first release: chiding those who passed judgement on himself and his kind, he warns that ‘While you talk about me/ Someone else is judging you.’ The song hardly sold at all and radio play was nonexistent; this was in contrast to the experience of Desmond Dekker, whose first song, ‘Honour Your Father and Your Mother’, was a hit.

At that same session Bob recorded two other ska numbers, ‘Terror’ (‘He who rules by terror do aggrievous wrongs/ In hell I’ll count his error/ Let them hear my song’) and ‘One Cup of Coffee’, which were both put out as 45s, to little avail. ‘One Cup of Coffee’, a strange saga of separation and financial settlement, was a signpost to the sharply observed, visual realism that would become a key feature of Bob Marley’s lyrics in years to come. For now, however, the few listeners that ‘Judge Not’ garnered assumed it was the work of one ‘Bobby Martell’, the name listed on the label: Kong had renamed him with this kitsch moniker in much the same way as he had changed James Chambers’ name to Jimmy Cliff. (Released in England on the new Island Records label, ‘Judge Not’ was credited to ‘Robert Morley’.)

Leslie Kong was largely preoccupied with his new, big-selling vocal act, Jackie Opel, a Barbadian. And when the producer refused to give any more money to ‘Bobby Martell’ the relationship ended. It was said that, after an argument over Kong swindling him, Bob prophesied to the label owner, frightening him, that one day he would make plenty of money out of Bob but would never have the luxury of enjoying it. ‘So Robert said to me,’ said Desmond Dekker, ‘“Look, I’lla dig up.” I said, “Where you goin’?” Him say, “Watch out. I’ll leggo dis Chinaman y’unno. I’ll go up a Coxsone. Yuh a come?” I said, “Well, I gotta wait and see before I make my move.”’

Morgan, however, continued his association and friendship with Bob. The next year he emigrated to the United Kingdom. Kong promoted a pair of farewell shows for him, one at the Capri Theatre in May Penn in the middle of the island, and another in Montego Bay, and Derrick Morgan ensured that Bob was on each bill. Again, Morgan noted that Bob, perhaps through nervousness, had not balanced the energies of his performance especially well. At the Capri Theatre show, for example, ‘when Bob go on stage he was dancin’ more than he was singin’ … An’ ’im tired when ’im come back to the vocal, so me beg ’im and seh: “No, youth: when ya sing two verse you dance, an’ then you go back to your other verse.”’

At the Montego Bay venue, Bob performed as Morgan had suggested. But during ‘One Cup of Coffee’, his first song, he didn’t receive the audience response either of them had expected. In fact, the typically volatile and expressive Jamaican crowd started to boo. ‘The next song, ’im just get up and seh: “Judge not, before you judge yourself!” So the audience think a him mek that song immediately offa dem! And ’im tear dung the whole place with that tune: Judge not, before you judge yourself. When ’im reach a part there the audience ‘ray and seh: Wait, this boy a bad, ’im a jus’ mek a sound offa we, same time, yeah man, an’ deh so ’im hit. That was the last time I see Bob fe a long while.’

Kingstonians, however, were able to see ‘Bobby Martell’ most weeks, at the Queen’s Theatre, as part of the weekly Opportunity Knocks talent shows. These stage shows run by Vere Johns, before an audience of some 600 people, were broadcast on RJR, one of the island’s two radio stations, and featured such guest artists as Higgs and Wilson, and Alton and Eddy. The best contending singer would win a guinea (21 shillings, or £1.10), through the simple test of being brought back for the most encores – if the crowd took against you, you’d be booed off. Bob would steal these shows every time, hurrying away from the venue with his prize before other less successful contenders could beg some of it away from him. He would sing ‘Judge Not’, and another song he had written, ‘Fancy Curls’ (‘Last night your best friend was sick/ Goodness gracious, another of your trick/ Hey little girl with those fancy curls’). For a time Bob was even awarded the nickname ‘Fancy Curls’.

The fact that the records released by Beverley’s hadn’t sold was, after the initial disappointment, irrelevant. Only 16 years old, Bob had been given the sign that he was perfectly justified in imagining that there could be some kind of musical future for him. To make the next step forward, he decided to make a serious go of it with his spars from Trench Town. Accordingly, the Teenagers became first the Wailing Rudeboys, and then the Wailing Wailers, before finally mutating into simply the Wailers.

One of the maxims of a man called Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry who worked for Coxsone Dodd’s sound system, was that every man has a name for a purpose. So it also was and is with groups. And the name ‘The Wailers’ didn’t merely reflect some alleycat screech made by the trio. Whether consciously or unconsciously chosen, it spoke volumes about the deep miasma of anguish and lonely hurt all three, especially Nesta and Peter, had felt within their souls as youths coming up. Bob Marley’s vocals sound sometimes as if he is literally crying. ‘The world “wail” means to cry or to moan,’ said Peter Tosh later. ‘We were living in this so-called ghetto. No one to help them. We felt we were the only ones who could express the people’s feelings through music, and because of that the people loved it. So we did it.’

Definitively ghetto sufferahs, the trio responded to music made by their American equivalents – Ray Charles, Sam Cooke, and the flawless harmonising of the Impressions, led by Curtis Mayfield and Jerry Butler. When the Impressions came to Jamaica in the early 1960s to play warm-up dates before a US tour (the reason so many American acts played in Jamaica), all three Wailers went together to see them at the Carib Theatre, fighting to get up to the front row. The group’s ‘One Love’ utilised sections of the Impressions’ ‘People Get Ready’. The Wailers also recorded versions of the Impressions’ ‘Another Dance’, for Studio One, and ‘Keep On Movin’’, for Scratch Perry.

Looking at it with a clear vision, the future seemed to contain a myriad musical possibilities. But without that hope, the reality of Bob’s then existence only could have been seen as bitterly grim. He had no real source of income, and literally would have starved on occasions if it had not been for Tartar’s kitchen.

A further set of complications was on its way. Bob’s mother Cedella had become pregnant by Toddy, Bunny’s father, giving birth to Pearl Livingston early in 1962; Bob and Bunny were thereby linked even closer by their new half-sister. Bob, meanwhile, had had a passionate affair himself with a local girl, two years younger than he was. Her older brother, though, forbade the girl to carry on the relationship because of Bob’s white blood, a recurring and consistent problem for him. The shock of being the victim of such racism, combined with Pearl taking much of the unstinting attention that Cedella had previously given her son, caused tensions within Bob and in the yard at 19 Second Street. But did her brother have another reason for objecting to his sister associating with Bob Marley? For on 22 May 1963, Cheryl Murray, a local girl, gave birth to Bob Marley’s first child, Imani Carole, conceived when he was sixteen and about whom little is known.

It had taken the birth of Pearl to make Cedella realise precisely how hopeless her relationship was with the baby girl’s father. To escape from this unprofitable union and to advance her life, she decided to move to the north-eastern United States, to Wilmington in Delaware, where there was yet another branch of the Malcolm family. She agonised over what to do with her son. But then it was decided that he would stay behind and wait for her to send for him and for Pearl.

Cedella’s sister Enid moved into the home on Second Street to care for her nephew and niece. When Enid moved back to St Ann, however, Toddy Livingston took over the apartment. Although the residence theoretically remained as Bob’s home, he was unhappy when Toddy moved in Ceciline, another of his baby-mothers. Bob turned up at 19 Second Street less and less frequently. Effectively, he found himself homeless, living for a time in west Kingston’s various squatter camps. It was as though, yet again, he had been abandoned. To all intents and purposes, he was destitute. But then Tartar took him in and gave him a corner of the kitchen, in which he also slept. Bob’s bed was the gambling table that Tartar would set up for reasons that were both social and financial: Bob would have to wait until the games had finished to reclaim his bed.

These were very hard times indeed. But in that strange way in which adversity can be turned to advantage, they also served to focus and hone Bob’s art. There was no choice, no other way out. Bunny would come round, and – to a lesser extent – Peter and Junior Braithwaite, and they would sit around practising harmonies until they fell asleep. ‘Me and Bunny used to be the harmony of the group, and we sang harmony like birds,’ said Peter Tosh. ‘We two sing harmony, sound like five. Bob Marley never sing harmony, no time.’

Junior Braithwaite had been born on 4 April 1949 on Third Street and West Road, in what became known as Rema, immediately to the east of Trench Town. Also living on Third Street was Joe Higgs; Roy Wilson, Higgs’s partner in Higgs and Wilson, had been raised by Junior Braithwaite’s grandmother. ‘They used to rehearse in the back of our yard,’ Junior Braithwaite said. ‘So we as kids hang out around them.’ The early Wailers, comprised of Bob, Bunny, Peter, Junior Braithwaite, and a girl they would soon meet called Beverley Kelso was, according to Junior, ‘just a singing group, a harmonising group. We had nothing to do with instruments.’ In the early days of the group, other potential members had been briefly tried out: a couple of tenors, Barrington Sayles and Ricardo Porter, decided for themselves that their voices weren’t really strong enough; meanwhile, ‘P’, the sister of Joe Brown, a rude boy from Second Street, would turn up at early rehearsals, but also came to the conclusion that her vocals were not sufficiently powerful.

Falling back on himself in these endless rehearsals, Bob found his confidence and ability growing almost by the day. To provide light for their sessions, another ghetto-dweller by the name of George Headley Robinson would gather brushwood from all about the area and lug it to Tartar’s yard. Some thirteen years older than Bob, ‘Georgie’, as he was more commonly known, was a devoted believer in the talents of the youth and his musical companions. Georgie, who made his living as a fisherman, would try and instruct Bob in matters of Rastafari, constantly referring to one of the copies of the Bible that are omnipresent in Jamaica. ‘But Bob,’ Georgie said, ‘was too young to reason with me.’

‘Georgie would sit there shirtless all night,’ Tartar recollected, ‘tending the flames as they played.’ When they awoke, after falling asleep exhausted from playing, the fire would still be burning; straightaway Georgie would ‘bwile up some porridge’ or a kettle for some bush tea.

At around this time, unexpectedly, a turning point was reached. Alvin Patterson – Seeco the rhythm master – was acquainted with Clement Dodd, the sound-system man who had begun his own record label. He knew of the auditions that Coxsone would regularly hold on Sundays at Studio One, his new one-track studio on Brentford Road, to the north of Trench Town. In the summer of 1964, at the urging of Joe Higgs, Seeco took Bob and the rest of the group, including Beverley Kelso and another girl called Cherry Smith (also sometimes known as Cherry Green after the surname of her brother) over there one Sunday. Cherry’s real name was Ermine Ortense Bramwell, but she gained the nickname Cherry from her skin’s red hue.

Although Clement ‘Coxsone’ Dodd was not a musician himself, he had what Ernest Ranglin described as ‘an extraordinary pair of ears’. He was also a wizard at contriving musical concepts. ‘He was really the man, the man who came up with the ideas. But he couldn’t play, so he would come and explain it to us. After explaining it, I always knew what the man wanted.’

One Sunday morning in 1959, bass player Cluett ‘Clue-J’ Johnson and Ranglin had been requested by Coxsone in a surprisingly formal manner to meet him at the liquor store he ran in Love Lane. ‘I need something to get away from this blues,’ he told the two master musicians, bemoaning the manner in which Jamaican music was imitating contemporary American black music.

In the store’s backyard, they sat down and worked out the recipe for a new sound; they sought a formula for a music that was distinctly Jamaican whilst retaining its roots in the R’n’B and popular jazz that beamed down into Jamaica from radio stations in the southern American states. Ska, the music that resulted from that Sunday-morning session, was a shuffle boogie rhythm of the type popularised by artists such as Louis Jordan and Erskine Hawkins; the unexpected emphasis on the offbeat only emphasised its addictive flavour. An apocryphal explanation of the galloping sound of ska was that this was a replication of the way music on those southern stations would fade in and out. Ranglin, however, has a simpler explanation: ‘We just wanted it to sound like the theme music from one of those westerns that were on TV all the time in the late 1950s.’ The term ‘ska’ was an abbreviation of ‘skavoovee’, a popular catchphrase of the time, a term of approval, for the use of which ‘Clue-J’ was famous. (Coxsone, for his part, addressed almost every man he encountered as ‘Jackson’, for which verbal eccentricity he was at least equally renowned: when he used the term ‘Jackson’, it frequently indicated disapproval, that the artist was not coming up to scratch.)

The next day, Coxsone went to the JBC Radio studios, which could be hired for recording, and started trying out examples of this new music to be tested on his sound system. The first ska record that was released, after it had received tumultuous acclaim at dances, was ‘Easy Snappin’’ by Theophilus Beckford. It featured pianist Beckford on vocals, ‘Clue-J’ on bass, Ian Pearson on drums, Ken Richards on guitar, Roland Alphonso on tenor sax, and trombonist Rico Rodriguez. The record was a big hit; its B-side was ‘Silky’, featuring Ernest Ranglin on his own composition.

‘Easy Snappin’’ was also the first tune Coxsone recorded at Federal Studio. When Federal bought equipment for a two-track, Coxsone bought their original one-track from them and installed it in new premises, a former nightclub, he was taking over at 13 Brentford Road in the Crossroads area of Kingston. As well as housing his new studio, Coxsone also opened a further liquor store within it. After a time, Federal graduated to an eight-track machine, and Coxsone purchased their two-track.

It was to these new premises, which would form the base and basis of Clement Dodd’s Studio One label, that Seeco took the Wailers. Listening to them in his studio’s dusty yard, beneath the mango tree that was the location of these weekly auditions, Coxsone liked their sound and several of the songs they had written. But he didn’t truly bite it until they played their fifth tune: Bunny suggested ‘Simmer Down’, the song Bob had been playing about with for at least two years. Before Bob answered, Peter started playing it. They hadn’t even sung a full verse before Coxsone declared, ‘Okay, that one: come tomorrow and we’ll record that one.’

‘I was very impressed with them the first time,’ remembered Coxsone. ‘I was hoping to really get a kind of group with that team feel, young voices and things like that. But they need a lot of polishing.’

Bob Marley himself wasn’t as enthused about ‘Simmer Down’ as Coxsone and the rest of the group: Coxsone knew it would work as a sound-system song, but Bob allegedly saw the tune, so old it had become part of his mental furniture, as a nursery-rhyme-type number – paradoxically, much of ‘Simmer Down’, as it had originally been conceived, is sound-system battle-talk. However, he would not let his personal opinion interfere with an opportunity to make another record.

Coxsone Dodd signed the Wailers as both performers and songwriters. They were offered his standard deal: a five-year contract for exclusive recording rights and management, and a guarantee of twenty pounds between them for every side.

The money on offer was so small that it hardly improved the group’s financial position one iota. Accordingly, for the entire time they would record with Coxsone Dodd, the Wailers would get by with that same routine of hustle-hustle-scrape employed by much of the local youth merely to keep existing. Going down to the beach and fishing with a rod and line, they would take what they caught to the market, exchanging the fish for other food; off the local trees they would pick mangoes, ackee, guinips, tambrines, and June-plums and sell them; they would also gather up any scrap metal or bottles, and regularly would voyage over to the nearby dairy farm to pick up all the lead that came off the milk tins. Sponsored when necessary by his father, Bunny was more likely to have a few pence in his pockets. Peter was the only one with any sort of job, pressing clothes at a local dry-cleaner’s run by a friend; he would care for the Wailers’ stage outfits, and also their day-to-day clothes – they each had two pairs of pants and two shirts. Bob, meanwhile, would simply try to somehow get by.

When, within days, the first session took place, the sides chosen were not ‘Simmer Down’ but ‘I’m Still Waiting’ and ‘It Hurts to be Alone’, engineered by Sid ‘Siddie’ Bucknor, Coxsone Dodd’s cousin, who performed the same function on most of their Studio One work. Although Coxsone had marked out ‘Simmer Down’ for release as a single, he first wanted to establish interest in the Wailers by pushing another song to be promoted by his several sound system sets. ‘They had songs that was all do-over material, early doo-wop stuff, so I instructed them to try and do some writing.’ Out of an evening’s work at Studio One, overseen by Coxsone and Ernest Ranglin, had come ‘I’m Still Waiting’ and ‘It Hurts to Be Alone’. The first song was a beautiful Bob Marley original, even though the preamble of the vocal harmonies owed much to the Impressions. But when Bob delivered his breathtakingly sweet vocal solo, it bled from a tearful heart; suspended in a void of echoing pain, his voice felt as though it was recorded at a different, slowed-down speed from the rest of the track. ‘It Hurts to be Alone’ was a Junior Braithwaite number, on which he sang lead. As Coxsone’s house arranger, Ernest Ranglin oversaw the production of the pair of sides.

The instrumentation was basic: Lloyd Knibbs on drums, Lloyd Brevett on bass, and Jah Jerry Haines on guitar. Bob, noted Jah Jerry, was ‘a nice boy, a nice young feller: not a rough guy, a polite guy’.

For once Ranglin didn’t have to spice up the song with guitar overdubs. ‘You could see they had something in them. They were all very nice guys, but they seemed very young. And little too.’ Braithwaite, in particular, was very short, whilst both Bob and Bunny stood not much more than five foot four inches in height; by comparison, Peter Tosh, at six feet four, seemed to tower over the rest of the group. After Coxsone had pressed up three hundred copies of the two tunes, they were distributed to sound systems; the word came back that ‘It Hurts to be Alone’ was going down well.

As soon as Coxsone heard this, he called the group back to the studio. But there had been changes of which no one had notified him. Junior Braithwaite wasn’t with them: to Coxsone’s surprise and initial chagrin he learned that Braithwaite was in the final stages of preparing to leave Jamaica for Chicago with his family. ‘I only lead sung on “It Hurts to be Alone”,’ said Junior. ‘And that was the day, 28 August 1964, just before I flew out of Jamaica. Because they had to have me do a solo just before I left, and so it only took a few hours to learn this new tune, and one take. We were that tough, man.’

If Coxsone were to continue working with the group, the producer insisted, the Wailers required a clearly defined lead vocalist. After some discussion, it was decided that the task should fall to Bob Marley; Bunny and Peter were promised they would also get their share of lead vocals. Coxsone was encouraged in this decision by ‘Simmer Down’, the contract-winning song Bob had sung at the audition which served a dual purpose: a warning to the newly emergent rude boys – that tribal grouping of cool, disaffected, and desperate youth – not to bring down the wrath of the law upon themselves; and a frustrated response to a letter from Bob’s mother in the United States, fearful that her only son was becoming involved with bad company.

The full panoply of his label’s finest ska musicians was summoned by Coxsone for the session. Yet again Ernest Ranglin arranged the tune, whilst Don Drummond, Jamaica’s king of the trombone, added his deeply creative jazz parts. Drummond, who had played with Ranglin in the Eric Dean Orchestra, was the virtuoso of a group of musicians who shortly were to be working together, for a little over a year, under the name of the Skatalites, an ensemble that would in time become legendary. As well as Drummond, the group included Roland Alphonso and Tommy McCook, the group’s leader, on tenor sax, Lester Sterling on alto sax, Johnny ‘Dizzy’ Moore on trumpet, Jah Jerry on guitar, Lloyd Nibbs on drums, Lloyd Brevitt on bass and Jackie Mittoo on keyboards, along with Theophilus Beckford and Clue-J Johnson.

Being part of this elite team was far more financially remunerative than being one of the accredited artists on the record label. Coxsone paid £2 a tune per musician, and frequently they would record twenty songs in a day. One bonanza day, Jah Jerry worked on fifty songs in an epic session at Beverley’s. In 1964, this kind of money would have meant you were considered rich in the United Kingdom or even in the United States, let alone in impoverished Jamaica. Often hanging around at 13 Brentford Road was Jackie Opel, the Bajan vocal star, first pushed by Leslie Kong, and renowned for the rare six-octave range with which he would perform his soul tunes; his ‘Cry Me a River’ (aka ‘You Gotta Cry’) tune had sold a million copies in Jamaica, Britain, and the US, and it was said that Coxsone was anxious that he should not learn of this. (When in 1970 Jackie Opel was in a fatal car-crash on a highway in his native Barbados, there were some who attributed this to the effects of obeah.) Notwithstanding the financial imbalance between Studio One’s session musicians and the Wailers, Jah Jerry could not but help being struck by their extreme confidence on the ‘Simmer Down’ session. This was a mark, he was sure, of their regular, rigorous rehearsals.

The Wailers, noted Johnny Moore, trumpet player for the Skatalites, had first come along to Studio One ‘more or less as the Impressions: they were dissuaded from going along that line, and influenced to go inside themselves, however silly or simple they feared what they found there might sound like. They were simply urged to try and cultivate their own thing. And it worked. Even at that age they knew what they wanted. From the time that they realised that trying to be the Impressions was not what they should be doing, they really checked themselves and got into it. You can hear it in the music.

‘At the time they were young and vibrant, and you could see they were very good friends: they were very, very close to one another. They really did care about each other. I guess that’s why they made a success of it as it was.

‘Bob didn’t necessarily seem like the leader. The thing was so closely knit, the sound, whatever they were trying to get at: that was the objective, the force of what they were trying to accomplish. Rather than worrying about you lead or me lead: everyone would put their shoulder and heave-ho. They seemed to realise that it’s much easier to get things done that way.’

It was for professional reasons that Joe Higgs would accompany the group up from Trench Town to Studio One. ‘Wailers weren’t even conscious of sound when I started to deal with them. To hear that “Joe assisted with the Wailers” – this is foolishness. The Wailers weren’t singers until I taught them. It took me years to teach Bob Marley what sound consciousness was about. It took me years to teach the Wailers. For example, they will be going to make a record and I would go with them and there is somebody making constant mistakes. I would just have to take his part to get the record finished in time.’

(Interestingly, at this time, Peter Tosh brought a potential singer called Leonard Dillon to Studio One. Although he would later form the Ethiopians with Aston Morrison and Stephen Taylor, Dillon recorded four tunes as a solo act for Coxsone Dodd, under the nom-de-disque of Jack Sparrow; he was backed on all of them by the voices of the Wailers, with the tunes arranged to an extent by Lee Perry but largely by Jackie Mittoo, the label’s driving force from 1964 to 1969, its golden period. Working as musical director, principal arranger and keyboard player, Mittoo’s relaxed, cool style on his Hammond B3 organ would make him a legend. But, according to Dillon, who occasionally played trumpet with the Skatalites, the legend that Bob Marley became was not at that point the main thrust behind the Wailers. Instead, he said, he felt it was Bunny Livingston who was pushing the group along.)

Beverley Kelso was born on 14 April 1948, the third eldest of three sisters and four brothers, in Jones Town. But when she was three her family moved to 4 Fifth Street in Trench Town. The popular conception of Trench Town as an area of grinding poverty was not the place that Beverley knew: ‘Trench Town people dressed to their best. I would say there wasn’t poor people, because majority of Trench Town people go to high school, they’re educated people.’

Also on Fifth Street lived Alton Ellis and his family: the entire neighbourhood would gather to watch him and his talented sister Hortense rehearse in their yard. Even at a young age, Beverley Kelso knew something of the art of singing. In the school choir at Denham Town primary school, she was the lead vocalist on the hymns they would perform at morning assembly. The then zenith of her vocal achievements was when she performed solo, singing ‘I Waited for the Lord’ at St Andrew Scots Kirk for Queen Elizabeth II on the 1954 visit to the island by the newly crowned British monarch. ‘I was the first to sing. They didn’t even wait until the song finished, they were just clapping. And then that made me sing for the better.’

To perform before Queen Elizabeth, Beverley needed to overcome her natural shyness. ‘Sometimes we’d all just sit there on the side of the road and somebody would start to sing something. But I was a quiet one. I never bother. I just shut up and listen. But I loved the singing. But I was so shy. I’m still shy.’

Ten years after that regal performance, some friends of Beverley persuaded her to accompany them to Chocomo Lawn, the celebrated outdoor dancehall in Denham Town, west Kingston. (Although run in conjunction with Edward Seaga and the JLP, Chocomo’s appeal overrode its political affiliation.) When she arrived there, they asked her to perform, suggesting she sing Patti LaBelle’s ‘Down the Aisle’. And the moment Beverley uttered the opening lines, ‘the fence tear down,’ the crowd pushing forward to see her: this made Beverley so nervous that she started the song all over again.

The next evening, after she had returned home from school, Beverley was cleaning the kitchen when there was a knock on the door. Bob Marley, who had seen her Chocomo Lawn performance, was standing there. ‘I asked him, “You want somebody?” He said, “Yes, you.” I said, “Me?” And he said, “Yeah, I’d like it if you’d sing a song with me.” So I said, “Well, you’ll have to ask my mother if you want me to sing with you. But my mother is not here now. She went to work.”’

Beverley had never met Bob before. ‘My first impression of him was ordinary. Ordinary. I didn’t think of him as nobody special. But he was very polite. Never sad. Even that evening he was just smiling. He was just looking at me, like, oh, pretty girl. That’s what I have in my mind.

‘When he came back my mother was there. And he asked her and she said, “Yes, but you’ll have to take care of her.” He asked me if I could come and rehearse the same evening.’

Beverley knew where to go, the fourth yard on Second Street, because her family would buy bread from Sonny and Gertie Hibbert, who lived at 13 Second Street, across the road from a rehearsal yard at 14 Second Street. ‘So I went up and when I went there Peter, Bunny, and Junior was sitting under a tree on a workbench. Bob wasn’t there.’

Bob had gone off to collect their guitar. When he returned with it, he introduced Beverley to Peter, Bunny, and Junior. But, she emphasised, ‘I didn’t call him Bob and nobody in Trench Town called him Bob. He introduced himself to me as Lester.’ One might assume this to be a misremembering of ‘Nesta’, precisely what had concerned the boy’s mother when his father suggested the name. Yet Cherry Smith – shortly also to be singing with the Wailers – also believed that Bob was called ‘Lester’: had he renamed himself with such a corruption of his original first name? Or is this simply an example of Jamaican word mutation, in which aural misunderstandings translate into such oral errors as ‘Matthews Lane’ being pronounced as ‘Mattress Lane’? It was only shortly afterwards that Rita Anderson first met him, and she insists he was known to all Trench Town as ‘Robbie’. It is worth remembering that, in Jamaica, people are often known by several different names and nicknames – for example, ‘Little’ Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry, the ‘Upsetter’.

At Beverley Kelso’s evening encounter with ‘Lester’ and his fellow musicians, she immediately began to rehearse ‘Simmer Down’ with them. In rehearsal, ‘Simmer Down’ had seemed like some tough Jamaican variant of the protest ‘message’ songs newly popular in the United States. In the recording studio, however, it became positively transcendent. Popular songs with lines about the running bellies of nanny-goats? This song was not only very unusual, but also tied together by an extremely commercial set of hooks.

‘Control your temper/ Simmer down/ The battle will get hotter/ Simmer down,’ declared Bob on what was one of his greatest songs. In the style unique to Coxsone’s label, the voices are buried back in the mix, fighting to get out with the same ferocity with which they had tried to liberate themselves from the dead-end of the ghetto. Could the vocal sound have been a reflection of the studio conditions? On the ‘Simmer Down’ session, Bob Marley stood directly in front of the microphone, flanked on either side by Bunny and Peter, forming a half-circle, their faces almost touching. Coxsone himself engineered the recording on his portable one-track that he unplugged and took home at the end of the session.

Also providing backing vocals – though not on the earliest recording sessions – was Cherry Smith. Cherry was born Ermine Bramwell in Upper Trench Town on 22 August 1943, although the family soon moved to Jones Town. ‘Green’ was her half-brother’s surname, which she took when her father died in 1958, after which they moved to Second Street in Trench Town. Her father, a dentist, had been relatively affluent, and the family had a large radiogram in the house, ideal for listening every Saturday night to the latest hit tunes on Duke Reid’s radio show – she would turn it up loud so that all the neighbours could hear. Her musical Trench Town neighbours included Lascelles Perkins, Alton Ellis and his sister Hortense, Jimmy Tucker, a group called the Schoolboys, which included ‘Pipe’ Matthews and ‘Bread’ MacDonald, later of the Wailing Souls, and the ubiquitous Higgs and Wilson.

At the Baptist Church Sunday School she would sing songs such as ‘Let the Lord be Seen in You’, which she would later record with the Wailers for Coxsone Dodd. Yet it was in American popular music that lay her main musical love: ‘Harry Belafonte, Nat King Cole, Duke Ellington, and all those kind of big-band people.’

One day Joe Higgs heard Cherry’s voice, as she copied a recent American hit tune whilst she washed clothes in the yard. ‘My voice was way up there and he stopped immediately. He said, “Cherry, that’s you?” So I said, “Yeah.” We used to listen to him and he would tell us little things,’ she said.

Another figure in the area familiar to her was the Marley boy: ‘All the little girls used to like him. Nice boy. He was funny. Cracking jokes. Teasing. He used to be shy, though.’ She recalled a significant sobriquet that was given to him: ‘We used to call him “Little White Boy”, cos his hair was curly.’ Rather than offering a judgement, the nickname seemed to be one of affection: contrary to the myth, Cherry does not believe that being a ‘browning’, as mixed-race individuals are frequently known in Jamaica, led the teenage Bob Marley to be picked on in any way. ‘We was all kids. We grew up with all different people. There was two Chinese boy, they live in the Bronx now. They had a grocery shop there right in front of where they guys used to rehearse. Mr Lee’s.’

But Cherry was struck by Bob’s appearance, hardly that of a ragamuffin ghetto boy: Nesta and Bunny, she said, ‘used to dress nice in the Fifth Avenue shoes and nice shirt.’ Peter, she remembered, invariably would be with them: ‘Peter come with his guitar. Peter was always feisty, he had an attitude. Bossy, mouthy, oh yes. Full of joke.’ More than the other two, Peter came the closest to personifying high-spirited pushiness. Not once, for example, did Cherry recall Nesta getting into a fight; invariably she saw him out with Bunny: ‘You always see both of them together. They were polite, well-mannered, intelligent. Like I said, we would just sit down and we would sing. Somebody try to do the bass, I think a guy named Barrington Sales. But he wasn’t strong enough. Then Peter come. And Georgie. Bob would say, “No, mon, that’s not your part.” You know, so everybody would try to sing.’

Cherry remembered a favourite spot of theirs, by Third Street and West Road, where they would sit and sing on the pavement, ‘by the Branch yard. It’s like the JLP. It’s a place, like a yard where they have meetings, and a youth club.’ Singing with the three of them would be ‘Cardo’ – Ricardo Scott, who eventually moved to the USA, where he gained medical and law degrees.

Unfortunately, Cherry Smith was unavailable for the first Coxsone Dodd sessions, having a regular well-paid seasonal job with Caribbean Preserving, providing money she needed to keep her 3-year-old daughter. Hence she was not available for the photographs of the line-up that featured Bob, Bunny, Peter, and Beverley Kelso. ‘When Junior Braithwaite left, that’s when I took his space,’ she said. Cherry sang on the recordings of ‘Amen’, ‘Lonesome Feelings’, ‘Maga Dog’, and ‘There She Goes’. But she also thought she sang on ‘I am Going Home’ (which both Bunny and Coxsone believed was recorded in the first session).

Before studio sessions, all concerned paid assiduous attention to mastering their parts in outdoor rehearsals, lit by a kerosene lamp or a fire, or simply the rays of the moon. ‘We rehearse and we rehearse, rehearse, until we know the song. And they would say, “Well, tomorrow we going up to the studio.” So we all get ready, get dressed and we walked with each other, a long walk. It’s nervous: a lot of people there. And we come back late in the night and we have to walk through this burying ground. ’Cause that’s the shortest way.’

Cherry Smith always felt that it was Junior Braithwaite who owned the finest voice of them all: ‘Oh yes. He carried.’ But as far as she was concerned, her singing excursions were only for fun – ’cause we didn’t get pay for it. We didn’t get nothing. He give us £5 to buy a dress.’ She and Beverley wore identical dresses for the only live show Cherry Smith played with the Wailers, at the Sombrero, shortly after she had recorded the ‘Maga Dog’ tune with Peter Tosh. As time passed at Studio One, however, the two girls would gradually fall away from the group.

Before the instant popularity of ‘Simmer Down’ had time truly to translate into sales, Bob found himself onstage as lead singer for the first time at that show at the Sombrero Club in Kingston. At the helm of the Wailers, he steered the group to a performance that stole the event, assisted in great part by the crisp and clear sound that Count Machuki, who had started as a DJ with Coxsone’s sound system, obtained for him at the mixing desk. The audience response was overwhelming, but the other artists on the show were vex. Both these acts recorded for Coxsone: did they sense a conspiracy?

Yet Beverley Kelso did not recall such a success translating into local reverence. ‘Nobody did not bow down to us. Nobody didn’t care who the Wailers was because Higgs and Wilson was already there singing. Hortense was singing, Bunny and Scully, Toots and the Maytals, Delroy Wilson, everybody was right there singing. People gathered to hear us sing but only because they were proud of us: when we would go to the studio people would just wave. The Wailers? It was just like ordinary people, you know.’

In those days, she said, none of them smoked – neither cigarettes nor herb. On the journey to Studio One, ‘me and Junior is two little short ones, so we would stay in the back, hold each other’s hand and walk and start talking our little talk. Bob would be pushing Bunny, Bunny would be pushing Bob and Peter, and they laugh and they clown and they tease each other. They would laugh at people. The little things that they talk, you just sit down and crack up. I’m telling you, you’d be around them you don’t wanna move. I used to look up on them and they look up on me. With respect. They treat me like a sister and they treat me good.’

Almost as soon as it was in the shops, ‘Simmer Down’ went to number one in the Jamaican charts. This tune’s subject of teenage crime was notice served that the Wailers were the ambassadors of the island’s rebels, the rude boys. Yet the Wailers were never able to compete with the colossal popularity enjoyed in Jamaica by another three-piece male vocal trio, the Maytals, fronted by Toots Hibbert.

The subject matter of ‘Simmer Down’ made the Wailers stand out amongst their contemporaries. Up until then no one in Jamaican music had been expressing ghetto thinking. Even the seasoned ska musicians down at Studio One were impressed. ‘The uniqueness of the sound they projected,’ said Johnny Moore, ‘was specifically local and really good. The subject matter was clean, and the lyrics were really educative. The statements might be a bit serious, but the way they projected it you could absorb what they were saying. There were some good lessons, we had to admit that.’

However, Beverley Kelso was surprised at the version of the song that was released. In fact, on it there was a vocal error by Peter Tosh, which seemed to appeal to Coxsone. ‘We had a better cut than the release. We was singing when the musicians come in, but Peter comes in at the wrong point and says “simmer”, and Coxsone said that’s it, that was the one that he wanted. So, it was a mistake, but it was made into something that wasn’t a mistake.’

New to the line-up, Beverley kept very much to herself at the session: ‘They said I was shy. I don’t think I was shy to sing, but after singing I wouldn’t say a word. If you say something to me I would answer you. I would sing and Bob and Peter and Bunny would be one place with all the rest of the guys and I would be just by myself. I was an observer.’ Unlike Leonard Dillon, Beverley confirmed that Bob appeared to be the acknowledged leader of the group. And that rigour was the middle name of their work ethic.

‘It was like every day or every other day we would be in the studio. If we’re not recording for ourselves, we were backing up other people because we have other people coming and singing. Like, for instance, if Tony Gregory or anybody in the studio want back-up we would just come in and harmonise. Everybody would just back-up, either you back sing, clap, whatever you wanna do over there to back-up everybody. So we was in the studio most of the time. We were like a family. And there were times when we didn’t go home. We would be in the studio like two, three days.

‘When Junior was leaving to go to America they were doing an album and for like, two, three days we would be in the studio. We didn’t have place to sleep. We didn’t even have no time to sleep. It was just fun in the studio. We would eat and would sit down and get a little nap. Sometimes I would run home and come right back. We have the privilege to go into that studio that most people they couldn’t come in.’

Bob was also learning some good lessons himself. A number of the musicians he now began playing with at Studio One – Johnny Moore himself, for example – were dedicated and devout Rastafarians. For years, Bob’s Bible had rarely been out of his sight. Now he began to be offered new, apocalyptic interpretations that would make his jaw drop with disbelief. Sometimes he would wander away from Studio One after a day’s sessions in a mystified haze, as he struggled to process the biblical information and interpolations to which he had been made privy.

Bob’s soul was being nourished. In addition, he now had sufficient funds to pay for the nutrition of his body: as well as having ordered gold lamé collarless suits – a kind of Beatle jacket version of the famous ensemble worn by Elvis Presley on the sleeve of Elvis Gold Discs Volume 2 – for the three men in the group, Coxsone had also put them each on a weekly wage of £3.

‘We all used to go to church to search, and knowing that we found reality and righteousness we relaxed,’ recalled Peter Tosh. ‘So when you saw us in the slick suits and things, we were just in the thing that was looked on as the thing at the time. So we just adjusted ourselves materially.’

‘Simmer Down’ was followed up by an official release for ‘It Hurts to be Alone’, another hit; curiously, even though the song had been written and sung by Junior Braithwaite, the title could definitively sum up Bob’s feelings about substantial chunks of his life. For the rest of 1964, the Wailing Wailers were rarely out of the Jamaican charts, with a string of tunes recorded at 13 Brentford Road: ‘Lonesome Feeling’, ‘Mr Talkative’, ‘I Don’t Need Your Love’, ‘Donna’ and ‘Wings of a Dove’. ‘Mr Dodd’ was not unhappy.

Coxsone became another father figure to Bob, and to a lesser extent, to Bunny and Peter. When he learned that Bob didn’t have a home of his own, he did a deal with the youth. He would turn new artists over to Bob to find songs for them; Bob could then sit down with his guitar with them – with Delroy Wilson or Hortense Ellis, for example – and rehearse the tune. In return, Clement Dodd would let Bob Marley live at the studio, and sleep in a back room they’d use for auditions or rehearsals. Bob was unable to put his head down, however, until the sessions had ended, often late-late in the night. And when he did, he often found his sleep was strangely disturbed, as though perhaps there was someone else in the room with him.

The Wailing Wailers had become the roughneck archetype of the three-piece harmony group, a specifically Jamaican form of high popular art that was more usually burnished to a shining gloss. By such members of their peer group as the estimable Alton Ellis, the group was considered to be very strong indeed. ‘They have a different sense of music than us, and we all love it. It wasn’t so much dancehall. Bob’s sound was always different: it mesmerised me from those times. His music always have a roots sense of direction. Not even just the words – I’m talking about the sound, the melody that him sing, the feel of the rhythm. Always a bit different.’

This sense was complemented in live performances. ‘Bob was always this ragamuffin onstage. We – myself, people like John Holt in the Paragons – were more polished and act like the Americans. Him was a rebel: jump up and throw himself about onstage. The Wailers them just mad and free: just threw themselves in and out of the music, carefree and careless.’

Miming to their records, the Wailers would appear all over Jamaica at dances at which the Downbeat sound system would play. This was a regular Coxsone strategy. ‘That’s how we got them launched. With several other of my artists, we used to tour the country parts.’ The Wailing Wailers made more hits: ‘I Need You’; ‘Dance With Me’, a rewrite of the Drifters’ ‘On Broadway’; ‘Another Dance’; and the ‘Ten Commandments of Love’, an extraordinary interpretation of the Aaron Neville song. And there were more tunes that seemed like messages direct from Rude Boy Central: ‘Rude Boy’ itself, late in 1965; ‘Rule Dem Rudie’; ‘Jailhouse’, another paean to rude boys, containing the lines ‘Can’t fight against the youth now/ ’Cause it’s wrong.’ Small wonder that such tunes took off with Jamaica’s teenagers, of whatever social origins.

Shortly before Christmas of 1964 the Wailers were at Studio One, recording a version of the standard ‘White Christmas’, using a two-track recorder. It was Peter Tosh’s idea to change the lyrics so that they contained greater authenticity for citizens of the tropical Caribbean: ‘I’m dreaming of a white Christmas, not like the ones I used to know.’ At the same session they recorded ‘I Left My Sins’ and ‘Sound the Trumpet’ – on which Johnny Moore took the solo on the instrument.

Religious holidays, specifically Christmas and Easter, were always counter-balanced in Jamaica by temporal celebrations, with top acts playing several morning shows, and literally running between the various venues, as they could not risk relying on the tardy bus service: from the Ward Theatre show, the Wailers would hurry up Orange Street, and along Slipe Road, to the State Theatre; further up Slipe Road they would reach the Regal on Old Hope Road; and then they would rush to the Carib, at the top of Slipe Road in Crossroads Square.

Enormous sartorial efforts would be made by the audiences, many clad in top hats and white gloves, wearing pleated and frilled shirts and carrying walking canes – as though they were attending an evening at London’s Café de Paris, rubbing shoulders with royalty.

The Wailers’ first exposure to such shows came on Christmas Day of that year. Their first significant live performances since enjoying chart success – ‘Simmer Down’ alone had sold 80,000 copies – the group was determined to wipe the floor with any opposition. Accordingly, they had assiduously rehearsed for over six weeks; warming up on the local beach with a game of football, they would practise until their act was an explosion of choreographed gymnastics, each member adept at splits and snap-falls. Bob, for example, would take Bunny and throw him in the air, fall to the floor as Bunny performed a perfect pair of splits above him, then rise into a kneeling position as Bunny jumped over his back; tall Peter, meanwhile, would balance and bounce Bob and Bunny like rubber balls. And, onstage, all this would take place as they assumed their customary vocal positions at the microphones. Beverley Kelso, meanwhile, was left to dance on her own, off to one side of the stage.

Many of these shows were put on by Coxsone Dodd – the Ward Theatre event was always one of his promotions – while Victor ‘Captain Daddy Glasses’ Sampson, Tony Cobb, Ronnie Nasralla, and Clancy Eccles would also promote these morning concerts.

At the Palace Theatre event on 25 December 1964, also promoted by Coxsone Dodd, the Wailers were backed by the Skatalites. Bouncing on to the stage as though they were in the full gaze of the sun on their sandy rehearsal space, the Wailers leapt into their first number, inevitably, ‘Simmer Down’. As the choreographed performance and heartfelt vocals of these new local heroes grabbed the audience’s attention, Dodd stood at the side of the stage in awe: great secrecy had surrounded the Wailers’ rehearsals for their Christmas Day shows, and he was thrilled by the sight of their routines. ‘Simmer Down’ was followed by ‘I Don’t Need Your Love’, ‘How Many Times?’, a version of the Impressions’ ‘I’m Going Home’, and ‘Amen’, which had been the B-side of ‘Simmer Down’. During the next number, ‘It Hurts to be Alone’, in the middle of a guitar solo by the masterful Trinidadian Lynn Taitt, the electrical power for the entire building cut out, infuriating the audience.

The Palace was located in a district controlled by a don with whom Coxsone Dodd had had some bad run-ins. Known as Big Junior, his reputation had been considerably bolstered in 1962 when he had appeared as one of the Three Blind Mice, a trio of hitmen, in the opening sequence of Dr. No, the first James Bond film to be shot, set largely in Jamaica. Due to their previous history, Coxsone assumed that the power had been cut by Big Junior’s gang to sabotage his promotion: after all, during the outage, a crew had rampaged through the packed crowd, snatching chains, bracelets, and wallets.

Hardly according with the season of good will, the audience raged on, yelling abuse and showering bottles like rain on the stage. In the dark, the Wailers nervously felt their way backstage, all of them squeezing into a single toilet together and hiding for at least an hour, feeling the storm of anger coming closer.

Suddenly the lights came back on: the loss of electricity had had nothing to do with Big Junior – the power-cut had been city-wide, and the don and his men were innocent of causing the outage. Eventually, the concert resumed. ‘When the show started again,’ said Beverley Kelso, clearly impressed by the boys’ gymnastic efforts, ‘Bob coming from one side like he was flying, Peter coming from one side like he was flying, flapping their arms, because they couldn’t dance.’ (Her assessment, of course, is markedly different from Derrick Morgan’s view of Bob Marley as a superlative dancer.)

The riot, however, immediately enhanced the Wailers’ reputation and legend. When they arrived later that day at the Ward Theatre, the crowd saw Bob and lifted him up on to their shoulders.

After the riot, the Wailers wrote the song ‘Hooligans’ about Big Junior. Another song also emerged from that Christmas morning, written by Peter Tosh: ‘Jumbie Jamboree’ with its newsworthy line ‘What a jumbie jamboree take place in the Palace’ – ‘jumbie’, a word that was by then old-fashioned in Jamaica, was a synonym for ‘duppy’. Both these songs, along with ‘Diamond Baby’ and ‘Playboy’, were recorded almost immediately, this time using a two-track recorder. (By now, Joe Higgs had established himself as a regular presence at Wailers sessions, sharpening up any harmonies he felt were too blunt. It was at one of these Studio One sessions that Coxsone, disagreeing with Joe, punched him in the eye, affecting his sight; it was always said that Coxsone, who had also kicked and punched his helper, ‘Little’ Lee Perry, would wait until you turned away before he hit you.)

Although each of the Wailers had only received a fee of £7 for the Palace gig, Coxsone Dodd was so delighted with the ultimate success of this chaotic show that, immediately after they came offstage, he gave them all a bonus of £3 – and topped it up with another pound per person at the studio the next day.

By the time they came to play their second big-production live show, in Montego Bay, ‘Mr Dodd’ had decided to give Beverley Kelso £2 for a new dress; when Peter and Joe Higgs learned of this, they tried to get her to share the money with them. It is this dress she wears on the cover of the Wailers’ Studio One records on the distinguished American reggae reissue label, Heartbeat Records. After driving all day to Montego Bay on the north coast for the show, they discovered that the venue had no sound system and no lights. Bob Marley attempted to calm the furious crowd, saying they would somehow perform all the same, but to no avail – they drove back to Kingston, exhausted. A further performance, again at Kingston’s Sombrero Club, turned out to be a big success, however. ‘That was great,’ said Beverley Kelso.

Smaller-scale shows were played most Monday nights at the Jamaica Success Club on Wildman Street, about a quarter mile to the east of East Parade; this was a weekly residency for the Coxsone Sound. An indoor, roofed venue, which held at least three thousand people, the Success had a small stage and the three frontline Wailers would huddle around a single microphone. Mind you, they would only be playing a couple of songs, generally the two sides of their latest release. And there would be half as many people dancing outside in the street as inside the venue. In fact, the ranking dancers, such as Persian the Cat and Harry T, would only dance outside, where they were certain of a large, dedicated audience. (Persian the Cat was a skinny, dark-brown Rastaman who would integrate his walking-stick, hat, and handkerchief into the moves he would ‘originate’ – the Tommy McCook instrumental ‘Persian Cat’ was written about him.) Another regular Saturday-night date for Dodd’s sound system was at the Forester Hall.

Although their sound made them aural celebrities in any part of Jamaica with access to a radio or jukebox, in downtown Kingston the Wailers went largely unrecognised, passers-by refusing to marry the down-to-earth appearances of these youths with any concept of stardom. Those familiar with them, however, would hail them on the street, receiving a personal Wailers vocal performance in exchange for a beer and some small change. Sometimes they would sing in the evenings for Sanghu, a drinksman who ran a small gambling house in the neighbourhood. Babu Man, a local gangster with a fearsome reputation, would often ask them to sing for him. The Wailers were not unnerved by his reputation: Bunny’s father enjoyed an even worse one, and the Wailers therefore always had a certain understood protection.

In 1965, the Wailers – as they simply had become known by now – delivered the spiritual counter-balance to such rude-boy militancy. ‘One Love’ was a distillation of the Rastafarian sentiments Bob had absorbed in his years in Trench Town; it contained the anthem-like essence of the message and philosophy of Rastafari: ‘Let’s join together and feel alright.’ Later in the year, the group recorded ‘Put It On’, another anthem to self-determination. According to the Jamaican music critic Garth White, ‘Put It On’ was a pivotal recording: ‘The religious, the romantic, and the sexual are all one – and yet nothing is overstated, one of the keys to Marley’s music.’ On 10 February 1966, ‘Put It On’ was played non-stop for over half an hour at the wedding of Bob Marley and Rita Anderson.

Alvarita Constantia Anderson had lived for most of her life at 18a Greenwich Park Road, off Lyndhurst Road in Trench Town. She was born in Cuba on 25 July 1946 to a Jamaican father and a Cuban mother, but whilst she was still a babe-in-arms her parents moved to Kingston. After her musician father and then her mother moved to England, she remained in the Jamaican capital with her aunt Viola and an uncle. She became a Sunday-school teacher in the Presbyterian church, but three evenings a week she also went to the more fundamentalist Church of God. Singing and getting the spirit like this was more than enjoyable to her. ‘I thought it was amazing. The first time I went there I watched and thought, “This is sanctifying, this is holy.” It came over me and I realised it was something for real that can take you away.’

Sometimes when she was out and about, she would see some of the local Rastafarians and feel very wary. She had been taught to be scared of them. But something about these wild men touched her heart. ‘I would also feel sympathy for them. I’d think, “Oh poor people. I don’t believe they are as bad as they say.” Because you’d see them and they’d say, “One Love”, and you would wonder how people saying that could deal with hate. Even though I was living in Trench Town, I was exposed to certain things above the normal living: I felt that these people were innocent, because of their innocency.’

Rita, to which her full name of Alvarita inevitably became abbreviated, had had a good high-school education. She had been training to be a nurse until a teenage love affair led to the birth of her daughter Sharon on 23 November 1964 – the child’s father, Rita’s boyfriend, had been sent to live in England by his parents to save all concerned from the shame of this illegitimate birth. ‘Auntie’, as Viola was largely known, contributed a great deal to the child’s care. Rita, meanwhile, was wondering whether she should become a teacher. And then she met Bob Marley.

Rita already knew of Bob as part of the Wailers. To her, when she heard them on the radio, their sound was definitively modern. And, for some reason, it seemed to have a profound effect on her. Then she realised why: ‘It sound like angels … So I say to myself, I shall be meeting these people one day.’

Studio One was north of Trench Town. Bob, Peter, and Bunny would pass through the Ghost Town area, along Greenwich Park Road where Rita lived, opposite Dovecot cemetery, on their journey to Coxsone’s recording yard. Standing at the gate, observing the world, Rita would see the trio, aware that it was these guys who were mashing up the charts with their hit tunes.

But Rita was not so impressed: to this strict ‘churchical gal’, they looked like ‘rough little guys’. As an ambitious girl, getting away from Trench Town was Rita’s principal concern; and she had a musical group of her own, the Soulettes, which she had formed with her friend Marlene ‘Precious’ Gifford, a fellow pupil at Dunrobin school, and her male cousin Constantine ‘Dream’ Walker (the son of Vesta Anderson, a sister of aunt Viola and a militantly political follower of Marcus Garvey). Dream would often also be at the gates of 18a Greenwich Park Road when the Wailers were walking past. ‘It was always an event to watch them, because it was like a gang going up the road,’ he said. ‘Like pied pipers, because they would walk, and Peter would have his guitar in his hand, and kids and people start to follow them, because of the vibes the men moved with.’ (‘Dream’ Walker, who developed a fine tenor voice and was a gifted guitarist, was born on 19 October 1951 – the same day, though not the same year, as Peter Tosh. He had acquired his sobriquet when the doctor informed his mother that she was pregnant. ‘Oh, doctor, that’s a dream,’ she had said, not believing she, a woman in her thirties, could be expecting a child; in what could be seen as something of a proprietorial gesture, as is much of the propensity for bestowing nicknames in Jamaica, a friend of the Wailers called Fowlie renamed him ‘Vision’, a term common for dreaming amongst the thinking youth – especially followers of Rastafari – in Jamaica.)

The Soulettes, a name inspired by Motown’s Marvelettes, copied hit tunes off the radio, often Motown material by the early Supremes, Martha and the Vandellas, or Mary Wells, singing most evenings under the plum tree in Rita’s auntie’s yard. Like so many Jamaican acts of the time they had first displayed their talents on Vere Johns’s amateur-hour radio programme, on which they had performed ‘What’s Your Name?’, an American R’n’B classic by Don and Juan. ‘When we harmonied that,’ said Dream/Vision Walker, ‘it used to just knock people out, that sound just like the record.’

Although she initially had been unimpressed with the cut of the Wailers’ collective jib, Rita decided that she should connect with these local stars – they clearly knew the runnings as to how to get records made. Waving to the three young men as they passed her house one evening, she received a response. As the other two members leaned on the cemetery wall, strumming guitars, Peter Tosh came over and introduced himself, addressing Rita as ‘nice girl’.

Determined to grab this opportunity, the Soulettes decided to make the Wailers aware that they also were a vocal group. Rita resolved that she, Dream and Marlene should try and sing for them, a blatant effort to move the Soulettes on a stage. When the three young men passed 18a Greenwich Park Road the next day, they were serenaded by the three Soulette members performing ‘What’s Your Name?’ from behind the fence of the yard – since her pregnancy Rita had been forbidden to venture beyond it to speak to men. But Peter and then ‘Robbie’, as she came to know him, stepped across the street to speak to her. It was Peter, however, who suggested that one day Rita and her two companions might want to come up to audition at Coxsone’s studio.

Although this was precisely what she had been seeking, Rita was aware of the wiles of local men – especially those who considered themselves to be musicians – and took the offer with a pinch of salt. But she had an older male friend called Andy who was also close to Clement Dodd. When, not long after, he took Rita up to the studio on Brentford Road, all three of the main Wailers were there. But they adopted a distinctly distant air until Rita reminded Peter that she was the girl who they would see standing on Greenwich Park Road. The Soulettes’ audition impressed Coxsone; moreover, the mixed-sex group was passed on to Bob for management and to find material for them.

If anything, Rita now realised, it was shyness that had been behind the offhand manner exhibited by the Wailers, and especially by Bob, towards her: their hit records had not gone to their heads, as she had initially suspected. Now she saw that staying on top of current music and being consistent, with hits one after another, was not easy. Especially when she discovered that though the Wailers were immensely popular, they were making virtually no money.