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Like most children of the ’70s, I was introduced to music through Sesame Street and The Muppet Show before discovering the songs that would come to shape me. And for this son of West Indian parents from Jamaica and Belize, the first one to hook me was “Three Little Birds” by Robert Nesta Marley, better known as Bob. Around the house, I’d repeatedly sing, “Don’t worry about a thing,” before understanding the tremendous influence that the biracial Rasta with the heavy Jamaican patois would have on my life.
My father would eventually show me the high-tech combination cabinet/record player with the 8-track addition located in the basement of our Chicago home, where he pulled out a vinyl with some strange title. He instructed me on the delicate process of making music come out of this piece of furniture so I could hear “Three Little Birds” whenever I wanted. I’d go on to play that record until the needle wore out, absorbing each song before developing the reading skills to discover it was Bob Marley’s Exodus album that had been the soundtrack of my childhood.
My world grew larger once our family moved to Texas in the waning days of the ’70s, as I was entering grade school. My musical landscape would become suffocated at first by the Top 40 hits kids used like social currency. Knowing the right music to listen to and which artists to have a crush on was crucial.
You could hear Bob’s influence in the ’80s English punk music my older sister loved, which would eventually grow on me. I was hearing Bob in my favorite band of that time, The Police, in songs like “So Lonely,” “Can’t Stand Losing You,” and “Roxanne,” from their album Outlandos d’Amour. They deftly incorporated the reggae influences born from Bob’s time in England during the early ’70s, offering me a cultural cross-breeding through music society hadn’t caught up to yet.
“When Bob Marley came to England it was very revolutionary to me because he turned rock music on its head,” Sting said in an interview on The Breakfast Club in 2018. “And then Marley’s philosophy, his spiritual message, his political message was very powerful.”
Bob was a troubadour, speaking unapologetically to power with rebellious favorites of mine like “Burnin’ and Lootin’” and “Crazy Baldheads.” Plus, I was developing a broad political ethos thanks to songs like “Them Belly Full (but We Hungry)” and “Get Up, Stand Up,” and spirituality through the cathartic honesty of “Redemption Song” (my favorite).
I’d find these elements again within the musical revolution banned from radio and scorned by MTV in the early ’80s, hip-hop. When this musical movement born in the Bronx finally made its way to my bedroom in Texas, I heard Bob. I heard him in street poets like Chuck D and KRS-ONE, keeping me aware of the unseen people in the shadows of my ZIP code. Chuck D referred to rap as “Black CNN,” and that’s exactly what it was for a kid protected by a carefully curated middle-class environment.
Bob’s musical and spiritual revolution during those fundamental years gifted me a rainbow coalition of lifelong friendships and inner peace that’s allowed me to grow in my own direction. With a new film honoring his life being released, I can only hope his message can resonate once again in our age of disconnection and division. As I wake with the rising sun, I can still hear Bob letting me know, “Every little thing is gonna be alright.”
SEE IT: Bob Marley: One Love, rated PG-13, plays at Bridgeport, Cedar Hills, City Center, Clackamas, Eastport, Evergreen Parkway, Fox Tower, Living Room, Lloyd Center, Mill Plain, Oak Grove, Pioneer Place, Progress Ridge, St. Johns Twin. Studio One.