Bob Marley Still Alive

http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/ae/articles/0813reggae0813marley.html

The father of reggae

Marley's music, ideas resonate

Michael Senft
The Arizona Republic
Aug. 13, 2006 12:00 AM To many music fans, Bob Marley is reggae.

The Jamaican superstar's political message and spiritual music resonate across the globe.

"In every country his message is identified with - even people in Mongolia hear his songs and know exactly what he's talking about," says Chris Wilson of Heartbeat Records, who has supervised the reissue of several collections of Marley's music, including this year's One Love.
Marley single-handedly brought reggae to America and England in the '70s with such classic albums as Burnin', which contained the hits Get Up Stand Up and I Shot the Sheriff. And no reggae musician has come close to his cultural impact since he succumbed to cancer in 1981.

"He is a poet like Bob Dylan, he was essentially writing folk and protest music and setting it to the reggae beat," says Valley singer-songwriter Walt Richardson, who was deeply influenced by Marley.

And Marley's musical growth defines the birth and evolution of reggae music.

He got his start recording at Studio One in Kingston, Jamaica, in the early '60s, cutting such tunes as the infectious Simmer Down, a plea for $Kingston's poor to stop rioting, as well as ska versions of Dylan and Beatles tunes.

By the end of the '60s, Marley had converted to Rastafarianism, a Jamaican religion whose followers revere Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie as the Messiah, smoke cannabis as a sacrament and grow their hair in dreadlocks. The beat of his music changed, going from the frenetic pace of ska to the slower groove we now know. Reggae was born.

"Marley is every bit as important as the Beatles," Wilson says. "And just as there will never be another Beatles, there will never be another Marley. He spent years learning his craft, learning what the great songwriters of the '50s and '60s did right through his work at Studio One and playing dance halls across Jamaica, just like the Beatles did playing brothels in Hamburg, Germany.

"When he set out on his own in the late '60s, he took those lessons and was ready to start making music his own way."