"One love, one heart
Let's get together and feel all right"
-- from One Love / People Get Ready
The cost of that address was exacting. Marley survived an assassination attempt in 1976 when gunmen stormed his Kingston home, wounding him and his wife Rita. He performed at the Smile Jamaica concert two days later, telling the crowd, "The people who are trying to make this world worse are not taking a day off. How can I?" He went into exile in London and recorded Exodus (1977), an album that blended the political fury of "Get Up, Stand Up" with the devotional surrender of "Three Little Birds." The cancer that would kill him was discovered in 1977, in a toe that had been injured playing soccer. He refused amputation on religious grounds. He kept touring, kept recording, kept believing that the music could outrun the prognosis.
What the Wailers achieved with Catch a Fire (1973) and Burnin' (1973) was the sound of a small island colonizing the world's imagination. The rhythm section of Aston "Family Man" Barrett on bass and his brother Carlton on drums created a pocket so deep that every subsequent reggae record has had to find its way within it. The I-Threes -- Rita Marley, Marcia Griffiths, and Judy Mowatt -- added harmonies that lifted the songs into something close to prayer. "No Woman, No Cry" became a global standard not because of its sorrow but because of its warmth, the way the voice refuses to let the memory fade. "Redemption Song," recorded solo with only an acoustic guitar, proved that Marley could strip away every instrument and still hold a room. The message of Rastafari -- repatriation, resistance, the divinity of Haile Selassie -- reached ears that would never have heard it otherwise, carried by melodies that refused to sound like politics.
He was thirty-six when he died, and the body of work he left behind has not aged a decade. The Wailers continue to tour under the name of the band, but the sound they make is the sound of a man who knew he did not have long and decided that every track needed to be worth leaving behind. "One Love" is played at weddings, funerals, peace rallies, and sporting events. It has become the most universal secular hymn in popular music, and no one remembers a time before it existed. Marley did not just bring reggae to the world. He brought Jamaica itself, in all its complication and beauty, and dared the world to keep up.
Bob Marley & The Wailers were profiled in the documentary, Marley, in 2012.
