Bob Marley turned reggae into music listened to by people with no connection whatever to Jamaica or Rastafarianism. He sang about freedom in a way that sounded not like a slogan but like air.
He was born in 1945 in Saint Ann, Jamaica, to a white British official and a young Jamaican mother. He grew up in poverty in Trenchtown, one of the poorest quarters of Kingston — the place where Jamaican ska was born, and out of which reggae came.
"No Woman, No Cry," "Redemption Song," "Buffalo Soldier," "One Love" — his songs became anthems of movements for the rights of the poor, for African independence, for human dignity everywhere.
In 1976 an attempt was made on his life, two days before a great reconciliation concert. Marley performed with a bullet wound in his arm. "The people who want to make this world worse don't take a day off. Why should I?"
He died of cancer in 1981. He was thirty-six.