Fiji Loves Bob Marley

No woman, no cry

Sunday, January 21, 2007
Fiji Times

IT'S a lament and a cry of defiance rolled into one that has become a classic. Bob Marley's No woman, no cry, is a song everyone relates to regardless of what they know of reggae and Rastafarians.

But why then did Marley, the most prolific song writer of the 20th Century, use a song he is not accredited with writing.

Check any Bob Marley and the Wailers album from Burning to the ultimate compilation Songs of Freedom and all but one track is written by the modern day prophet.

The exception is No woman, no cry, which is credited as being written by a V (for Vincent) Ford.

So who is this Vincent Ford and what is his role in a love ballad that Marley, his wife Rita and the world cherishes so much.

To find out we have to trip back to the 1960s and to Trenchtown, the Kingston, Jamaica, slum and hot-bed of criminality from where the gospel of reggae has captivated, conquered and transformed the world in a way no musician ever has, or will.

As the young Tuff Gong, as he was known in the meanest of alleys, most of Marley's friends were older than him, a sign of his maturity, and just one of the many signs of Jah that can be found in his life and work.

Everyone who was anyone or aspired to be someone had a street moniker, no matter his station.

Enter Vincent Ford, who was known as Jack Tartar, whose act of simple kindness to a bewildered country boy in the city, has immortalised him as a song writer extraordinaire and made him a wealthy man today.

They first met when Marley was 13 and Tartar, 17, and a close bond quickly developed.

Tartar started up his own street kitchen from his yard on First Street, after working as cook at a boys' town school, selling dumplings and bula, the poor man's bread made out of ground corn or maize.

Marley had no real source of income after his father had dragged him to Kingston, away from his mother Cedella in the country and then abandoned the boy in the capital city.

Most times when Marley was desperate, it was at Tartar's that he knew he would be given food and space to sleep. It was something Marley never forgot.

When Bob became serious about learning the guitar, it was Tartar who bought him a Teach Yourself Guitar chord book and then stayed up all night, turning the leaves' of the book as the young Nesta strummed the chords, peering at the diagrams of where to put his fingers in the light of a flickering oil lamp.

In the mornings, their nostrils would be black from the lamp's fumes.

In 1962, when Cedella moved to Delaware, in the US, Marley found himself moving from squatter camp to camp.

But Tartar heard of it and would have none of it.

He gave Marley a corner of his kitchen to sleep. Marley's bed was the gambling table that Tartar would set up on nights when the food didn't move too well in the day.

Marley often had to wait until the gambling had been done to reclaim his bed.

It was in that very same corner of Tartar's kitchen and on the very gambling table at which knives and guns had been flashed, that Marley first made love to Rita, the woman he was to marry and who stayed by his side despite his infidelities.

But those hard times helped to focus Marley who would strum on when everyone else was dropping off.

To provide light for their all-night sessions, another ghetto dweller, a George Headley Robinson, would gather brushwood from all over the place and shoulder it to Tartar's yard.

Georgie, some 13 years older than Marley, was a devoted believer in the talents of ghetto youths, in particular Marley and his companions.

Georgie, who made his living as a fisherman, would instruct the young in matters Rastafari, often referring to the Bible, something found in almost every home.

In Songs of Freedom, authors Adrian Boot and Chris Salewicz quote Tartar as: "Georgie would sit there shirtless all night, tending the flames as the youngsters played guitar.

When they awoke after falling asleep exhausted from playing guitar, the fire would still be burning and straightaway Georgie would boil up some porridge or bush tea, not unlike our drau ni moli.

In 1972, as Marley started on his global conquest, he penned the words for No woman, no cry while playing his acoustic guitar on a flight from Kingston to London.

As a mark of gratitude, Marley turned over the song writing credit to V Ford. Returning to Jamaica after becoming the face of reggae, Marley drove to Trenchtown from 56 Hope Road to visit one of the countless girls he had been seeing in between having children with Rita.

After going off to play soccer, Marley finally went back to Tartar's yard where Tartar and Georgie sat talking.

Without saying a word, Tartar fetched the old acoustic guitar Marley had first blistered his fingers on.

The now world star started off playing No woman, no cry, moving his friends to tears.

Today, Vincent Ford lives in comfort in Kingston from the royalties he receives for one of the all-time great songs.

But that is not the end of it. Marley's love prose is not only about his formative years in a ghetto that makes places like Jittu Estate, Wailea and River Road, Narere, seem like Tamavua or the Toorak of old.

His lament was a cry stretching back hundreds of years to the earliest settlement by the White man.

The Right Reverend Vili Vonokula, who spent six years doing God's work in Belize, a South American nation on the Caribbean coast, found out while attending a week-long seminar in Kingston, that the "no woman, no cry"call predates Marley, being buried in the psyche of a people who could not fathom the behaviour of their supposed superiors.

The Whites took with them their righteousness, their Christianity, their greed and largely lived lives of hypocrites and parasites, akin to the fat-cats in society today.

Those early brutalisers took over the land, brought in slaves and experimented with crops like cotton before finding sugar to be best suited for the Caribbean climate.

Those very same White estate owners, overseers and workers who went to church in their best on Sundays, became alcohol-infused rapists each night. It was their right to take any slave woman or child they found comely, often raping the victim in front of her parents to stamp their superiority.

As more and more mulattto, or mixed race children, were born, and reached maturity, the rapes became out of hand.

There was little a slave could do other than die in honour. The men did, tens of thousands of them killed trying to protect their woman.

Slowly, from estate to estate, across the breadth of Jamaica, when a girl child was deemed comely, and they were so deemed quite early in life in those days, she was sent away to the impregnable Blue Mountains where slaves had been taking refuge since the beginning of White settlement.

It was an area where even the "Red Coats"and later the constabulary feared to tread.

There, in the mountains, the women were safe, well, certainly safe for a lot longer than the White man would have allowed.

Over, time, the phrase "No woman no cry"became a call of defiance that bewildered the colonialist, who on seeing an attractive woman, could not work out why or where she had disappeared overnight while the slaves rejoiced because they would not have anguish at the brutalisation of yet another woman. Rastafari