Bob marley and me

[RonPrice]

Bob Marley(1945-1981), Jamaican singer, songwriter and musician, started his connection with the music business in 1959. He made a first attempt at solo singing and recorded his first two singles in 1962. Jamaica became an independent island nation in the Greater Antilles in the Caribbean that same year, on 6 August 1962. In 1959 I was 15 and joined the Baha’i Faith. In the same month of 1962 I began my pioneering-travelling life for the Canadian Baha’i community.

Marley is the only third-world performer to be elected to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. In 1999, the year I retired after 30 years as a teacher, the BBC named his “One Love” the “Song of the Millennium”; the same year Time declared his 1977 Exodus the “Best Album of the Twentieth Century.” Voted the third-greatest songwriter of all time in a 2001 BBC poll, behind Bob Dylan and John Lennon, Marley has sold an estimated 50 million records worldwide.-Ron Price with thanks to Wikipedia, 30 October 2011.

By the time you let your hair grow
and were into Rastafarianism I was
teaching high school in Australia. By
the autumn of 1976, after a series of
critically acclaimed albums & concert
tours, you were on your way to being
a global star—and I was on my way to
a career in Australian colleges. You first
attained fame in America not among US
blacks but rather white college students
to whom you were and remain famous
as much marijuana mascot as musician.

When you died in ‘81 you had become a
symbol and spokesman of anticolonial
aspiration for the world’s oppressed, &(1)
in ’81 I was working in a tin mine on the
west coast of Tasmania with decades of
life to live as a quiet commentator on the
Baha’i Faith and, in my retirement, on the
Internet & among cyberspace’s hundreds
of millions of websites & billions of users.

(1) Joshua Jelly-Schapiro, The Bob Marley Story, 9 April 2009, The New York Review of Books.

Ron Price

30 October 2011

Updated for SaddoBoxingcom
on: 16/11/'11