Before the Legend: The Rise of Bob Marley
by Christopher John Farley
Amistad, 216 pp., $9.95 (paper)
Bob Marley: Herald of the Postcolonial World?
by Jason Toynbee
Polity, 252 pp., $69.95; $22.95 (paper)
The Book of Exodus: The Making and Meaning of Bob Marley and the Wailers’ Album of the Century
by Vivien Goldman
Three Rivers, 325 pp., $14.95 (paper)
Soul Rebel: An Intimate Portrait of Bob Marley
by David Burnett
Insight Editions, 141 pp., $39.95
Bob Marley died of cancer on May 11, 1981, at the premature age of thirty-six. By then he was well known to college kids worldwide, but few could have foreseen the celebrity he has attained since. Born in Jamaica, he is the only third-world performer to be elected to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. In 1999, the BBC named his “One Love” the “Song of the Millennium”; the same year Time declared his 1977 Exodus the “Best Album of the Twentieth Century.” Voted the third-greatest songwriter of all time in a 2001 BBC poll (behind Bob Dylan and John Lennon), Marley has sold an estimated 50 million records worldwide. On the 2007 Forbes list of “Top-Earning Dead Celebrities,” he ranked twelfth, with his estate earning an estimated $4 million. His posthumous greatest-hits collection, Legend (1984), is among the top-selling compilations of all time. Twenty-seven years after his death, there is perhaps no country where his songs—wry ballads and martial anthems, with soothing or stirring melodies—aren’t familiar.
Letters
'The Bob Marley Story' June 11, 2009
