The Jamaican singer and songwriter who, between the late 1960s and his death in 1981, shaped reggae into a global language of liberation, carrying the Rastafari faith's message of Black pride and resistance to Babylon across every continent, surviving an assassination attempt and brokering an onstage truce in Jamaica's gang-torn politics, playing at Zimbabwe's independence, and becoming in a short life the first worldwide superstar of the developing world and a lasting symbol of freedom for the oppressed.
A boy born in a Jamaican village, son of a young Black mother and a white father he barely knew, grew up poor in a Kingston slum called Trench Town. He sang in an off-beat island style that almost no one outside Jamaica had heard. Within a decade his voice reached audiences around the world, and crowds in Africa, Europe, and the Pacific sang words like Jah, Zion, and Babylon back to him. Bob Marley turned reggae into a music of liberation and made the faith of a few poor believers into a sound the whole world knew. He died of cancer at thirty-six, already often described as the first global superstar to emerge from the developing world. The radical preacher of resistance would later be sold back to the world as a poster and a greatest-hits smile, which is its own kind of fame and its own kind of loss.