Endeavouring to understand and master music was something which Nesta Marley never stopped doing. As soon as he rose in the morning he picked up his guitar, and would rarely be without it for the rest of the day and night, practising immensely hard. With Joe Higgs, the harmony master, Nesta, Bunny, and Peter would often practise and rehearse until five in the morning. Taking a break around 2.30 a.m., they would head over to Ma ChiChi, who sold oily fried-corn dumplings and what was said to be Jamaica’s best soursop juice, so thick you had to tap the bottom of the bottle to get it out; Ma ChiChi only lit her pan at 2.30 a.m., when the dancehalls were closing down.
Other times in the early hours of the morning, the three youths would wander with Joe Higgs down to Back-a-Wall, then to Maypen Cemetery, then over to Hot and Cold. Singing all the time they walked, they would check out the responses to such songs they favoured as Little Antony and the Imperials’ ‘Tears on my Pillow’, the Platters’ ‘My Prayer’, Frankie Lymon’s ‘I’m Not a Juvenile Delinquent’, and Gene Chandler’s ‘Duke of Earl’, with Peter on the vocal bass part. At other times, they would stand on corners or in parks trying out material, or call on such revered local figures as Brother Gifford, One Sam, or Sonny Flight to air their musical wares for them, wondering whether they could detect the trio’s development.
Finally, they even acquired their first conventionally constructed and manufactured guitar. Around the corner of Ebenezer Street and Darling Lane, just off Spanish Town Road, in what is now Tivoli Gardens, was the Ebenezer Boys’ Club, a local youth club. Discovering that the institution possessed its own badly mistreated guitar, hardly larger than a child’s instrument, Bob appropriated it for the group.
It was Peter who could play guitar, and organ and piano, who worked with the instrument more than his two musical partners. One evening, they had been invited over to play in Greenwich Farm at the cold-supper shop of a man called Sheriff Brown, one of the area’s main herbsmen. Late for their show, the three youths were running there, racing each other. Then Peter’s foot collided with Bob’s, and he tumbled. He was carrying the Ebenezer guitar and it was smashed beyond repair.
Almost immediately they acquired a far more satisfactory replacement. It was sold to them by a local man named Deacon, an intellectual, highly literate Rasta who was a cultural historian and had stored and recorded the history of Marcus Garvey. Noticing the guitar hanging on Deacon’s wall, they made him an offer for it.
This guitar was full-sized and in good condition. Nicknaming the instrument ‘Betsy’, as Bo Diddley had christened his guitar, they added an electrical pick-up, and would use it either unamplified or with electricity. Five years later, in 1967, they were still using it on recordings.
It was now public knowledge in Trench Town that Nesta Marley, who was beginning to be known more as Bob, or Bobby or Robbie, was a musician of some sort. At that time, Pauline Morrison lived in the area and was a pupil at Kingston Senior School. Every afternoon she would make her way home from her lessons, usually with a large group of children from the same neighbourhood; they would walk from West Road to Thirteenth Street, to Ninth Street and the Gully Bank and then across a bridge. At the end of a lane, she invariably would see Bob sitting under a broad, tall tree, accompanying himself on a homemade guitar as he sang songs of his own composition. Fifteen or twenty schoolchildren would be gathered all around. It was a regular fixture. ‘We’d come from school and see this guy singing, singing, and we’d always sit around and watch and listen to him. After him finish we clap him, and after we’d go home.’
Bob seemed like a bird, remembered Pauline, ‘like a young hatchling just coming up’. Later, as success started to make his songs familiar, she would recognise some of the tunes from those after-school performances – he would certainly play, for example, an early version of ‘Simmer Down’; those who knew Bob would always hear him singing that song from around the beginning of 1962. (On that long journey back from school, she and her companions would often have had another musical experience: in an entirely different neighbourhood, a young Jimmy Cliff could also be seen singing, planted under the boughs of an ackee tree.)
Although football was almost as much a love for Bob Marley as music, he occasionally would also be seen playing cricket, on that same gully bank Pauline would have had to pass over. Ernest Ranglin would see him knocking a ball about as he passed and sometimes join in for a few minutes. To Ranglin he always seemed a very well-brought-up boy, extremely polite and considerate.
As a youth who knew what he wanted in life, Bob was not caught up in the negative existence of the ghetto bad boy, those packs of adolescents who only desired to emulate and try to surpass the worst exploits of the slum gangs of the United States, glorified and glamorised in movies such as West Side Story that they would catch at the Carib cinema after sneaking in the exit door.
Bob certainly wasn’t some pavement bully. Although, Pauline pointed out, ‘if a guy come for him and trouble him, him can defend himself.’ But even then he operated simultaneously on several levels. On the one hand, he was affable, open, eager to assist. ‘He was a very easygoing person,’ Pauline said. ‘He was never rude or anything. Him never be aggressive. Him was always irie to me, even as a kid coming from school. And although I still get to know him and be around him, him never be rude.’
Then again he could be almost the definition of a loner. ‘It was always the man and his guitar,’ Pauline observed. ‘But it was very rare you could just sit with him and be with him. Because he was a very moody person, the way I see him. Him is very moody. If people were sitting together with him, he would suddenly just get up and go somewhere else. Just to be by himself.’
In the end, Nesta knew, there was only one person he could rely on – himself – although he could expect the occasional unexpected intervention and assistance of others.
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