Bob Marley: The Hero I Didn’t Know I Had

So it’s 1996 and a three year old me has been awakened in the middle of the night by my own screams because I just had a nightmare. My mother comes to get me out of my bed and carries me downstairs to sit on the couch while she either cleans up or is putting up the Christmas tree for the holidays. She also has the stereo playing loud to where you could hear it throughout the entire house. With so much music that she loved, the first choice of what she was listening to was definitely Bob Marley, her hero who inadvertently became one of my heroes.

Bob Marley has been one of the biggest influences of my entire life. The funny thing is I didn’t even realize this until I grew up. I honestly never chose him to be a hero of mine and frankly I kinda didn’t like him at various points of my childhood because of how much my mother played his music nonstop. So how exactly did The Godfather of Reggae become one of my biggest heroes without me realizing it? Well, let me take you back to my youthful days to help you understand.

Since the day I was born I knew that my mother Ruby had a deep love for Bob Marley. She didn’t just listen to all of his music, but was heavily influenced by the culture of Jamaica that it came from and the world of reggae that preceded it. As with all the other music she loved, my mother played Bob Marley’s music during the most important as well the mundane events of the day. She’d play it when she was cooking and cleaning, she’d play it when she would exercise and she’d definitely play him nonstop during our road trips. Of course I was annoyed by it, as all kids generally dislike the things their parents love.

What I didn’t realize during these times was my mom didn’t just live Bob Marley’s music, but also lived by what she learned from the music in our everyday lives. When she started painting houses when I was a 10 years old, she painted one of the bedrooms in our house the color of the Jamaican flag and said that room was made to be dedicated to reggae and Jamaica. It was also around this time that she made me and both of my sisters start growing dreadlocks. This was something I definitely didn’t want to do, but my mom made it perfectly clear that I was not allowed to cut them until they got as long as Bob Marley’s. But why was my mother so heavily influenced by Bob Marley and the culture he came from so much?

The themes of Bob Marley’s music were the real-life principles that my mother lived by. When I was talking to her boyfriend about why she liked Bob Marley and reggae so much, her boyfriend then enlightened me on how much allegory on Christian faith could be found in Bob Marley’s music. This of course was very important to my mom as it was for the rest of our family. Bob Marley’s music was also well known for its social and cultural commentary in addition to talking about all the issues in the world. My mother was always culturally active and took me and my sisters to many events of such. She was also always conscious of the world’s woes at large and implored us to be conscious of them as well.

When the time came that I was no longer living with my mother I started coming into my own as a young adult. I started to slowly care more about and embody the traits of real-life that she cared so much about, many, if not most of which were found in Bob Marley. I remember when the film I Am Legend came out when I was in highschool and much of Bob Marley’s music was play throughout the film, especially “Redemption Song” and it all stuck with me like never before. It was like a piece of my mother that was buried inside me had made its way to the surface.

When my mother died in 2010 Bob Marley’s son Damian “Jr Gong” Marley released a collaboration album with one of my heroes of Hip Hop, Nas. The album was called Distant Relatives and it’s one of my favorite albums ever. I love the album because of it’s subject matter and tone, all of which were the same things found in Marley senior’s music that my mother loved so much. I now understood why Bob Marley was so influential to my mother and I then realized how much that influence had been poured into me.

A few years ago I was out shopping at the mall and found a couple of Bob Marley shirts. They reminded me of her so much so I bought them without hesitation. I felt so proud when I put them on because I knew she would’ve loved them so much and would’ve been overjoyed to see me wear them. Fast forward to today and the upcoming Bob Marley biopic titled Bob Marley: One Love is the most anticipated film of the season and in honor of my mother I will definitely be watching it in theaters.

As much as I didn’t understand it before, I know way better now. For the positive impact that made on my mother, Bob Marley is without a doubt one of my heroes. I may not have know he was for a long time, but I do now and I am eternally grateful for how he inspired my life.

~~Dedicated to Bob Nesta Marley and Ruby Lee Spencer.