Ginny and I and our friends Kemal and Tessy Sanli went to see the new Bob Marley movie at the Capri Theatre in Fondren. We had dinner first at Saltine then walked across State Street to see the movie.
Kind of like the King Edward Hotel downtown, the renovation of the Capri Theatre was a harbinger that Jackson urban renaissance was more than just a pipe dream.
There are never many people at the Capri, which I love. It’s like having your own private screening theatre. And having just one movie makes it really easy. Sometimes too many choices just causes stress.
I have been a Bob Marley fan since my college days at Harvard. Marly hit paydirt just as I was a sophomore in college. I’ll never forget sitting on a couch in a dorm room at Lowell House and hearing Bob Marley for the first time. The song was “No Woman, No Cry.”
I had never heard reggae music before. I was entranced by the genre's unique rhythm and style. Add to that, Marley’s simple genius and meaningful lyrics. I was immediately hooked.
It wasn’t just me. In Marley’s brief career, cut short at age 34 from a rare, super aggressive type of melanoma, he sold 75 million albums. The Great Google lists him as the second most influential musician of all time, right behind the Beatles and ahead of Elvis Presley.
Fifty years later, you can’t go anywhere in the Bahamas, the Caribbean or even the Florida beaches, without hearing his songs everywhere.
I’m not sure any huge modern musician displayed as much Christian influence as Bob Marley. Practically every song he wrote made a reference to the Old or New Testament. Scripture is interwoven with almost all his lyrics.
Coming from the Jamaican ghetto of Trenchtown, Marley’s Christian faith and persevering hope serves as a model for how to live life in the modern age while facing overwhelming adversity.
For example, in the song Johnny Was a Good Man, Marley writes, “Woman hold her head and cry, as her son had been shot down in the street and died from a stray bullet. Wondering how can she work it out? She knows that the wages of sin is death. Gift of Jah (God) is life.”
In One Love, Marley wrote, “Let's get together to fight this Holy Armageddon. So when the Man comes there will be no, no doom. Have pity on those whose chances grow thinner. There ain't no hiding place from the Father of Creation.”
Or how about Exodus, in which Marley writes, “We know where we're going. We know where we're from. We're leaving Babylon.We're going to our father’s land.”
One of my favorite lines from a Bob Marley song, which he borrowed from the famed Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie, was, “The color of a man’s skin should be no more significant than the color of his eyes.” Over the years, I have used that line many times in my column when writing about race.
In the summer of 1979, I stayed in Cambridge in a house of eight other Harvard students. I had gotten the summer job of managing editor of the Harvard Crimson, Harvard's daily newspaper.
Cambridge is paradise in the cool New England summer. It was one of the best summers of my life.
A group of folks had organized a music festival to raise awareness about South African apartheid and Bob Marley was the headliner at Harvard Stadium, playing before 20,000 or so.
Being a fan and editor of the paper, I arranged to interview Marley after the show. You can Google “Wyatt Emmerich and Bob Marley” and read what I wrote. The article was titled, “The Rasta Wizard Puts on Ivy.”
One question I asked was this: “Bob, do you find it hypocritical to be giving a concert to raise awareness about apartheid and oppression at the intellectual center of capitalism.” Marley gazed into my eyes for what seemed like forever. Then broke into a huge smile followed by a long laugh, never bothering to answer the question. I guess, probably correctly, he just considered the question too stupid to bother answering. He died two years later. I remember crying.
Sixteen years later it was 1995 and Ginny and I were on our honeymoon in Negril, Jamaica. One night Rita Marley, Bob’s wife, was giving a concert nearby. So we went.
The Hale-Bopp comet was brightly visible overhead and I was standing next to a very tall Rastafarian with dreadlocks as Rita Marley played her reggae setlist.
Then she switched gears, and sang a slow, emotional torch song about her long-gone husband Bob. One line in the song went something like, “And I remember the way I would ask you a question and you would just look at me and laugh.”
I turned to Ginny. “Yes, I remember that about Bob Marley. In fact, that’s exactly what he did to me.” It was a really cool moment. In Jamaica, comet overhead, Rasta man next to me, listening to Rita Marley singing about Bob and having actually experienced exactly what she was singing about.
The movie chronicles how significant Marley was in bringing an end to generations of gang violence in Jamaica. His national One Love Peace Concert ended with the two major political rivals, holding hands on stage. Since then, Jamaica has prospered and lived in relative peace.
Imagine what’s going on in Haiti today. And then imagine a singer/songwriter emerging and bringing generations of violence to a peaceful end. That’s what Marley did in Jamaica. It made him a hero around the world.
Jamaican Prime Minister Edward Seaga delivered the final funeral eulogy to Marley, saying:
“His voice was an omnipresent cry in our electronic world. His sharp features, majestic looks, and prancing style -- a vivid etching on the landscape of our minds. Bob Marley was never seen. He was an experience which left an indelible imprint with each encounter. Such a man cannot be erased from the mind. He is part of the collective consciousness of the nation.”
God works in mysterious ways, using all kinds of people, both good and bad, to accomplish His will. I’m not sure why God vaulted Marley to such heights only to call him home so quickly. But I feel certain of this: God put Marley here for a purpose. He fulfilled it and is now in paradise. The world, especially Jamaica and music, is forever better because of his life.
