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,