The singer was born Robert Nesta Marley on February 6, 1945, in the rural town of Nine Mile, Jamaica, the son of Cedella Booker and Norval Marley. “Bob Marley: One Love” doesn’t at all touch on Bob Marley’s father, who was white and died when his son was just 10. Because Bob was half white, after his mother began a new relationship, she treated him as an outcast, which the film doesn’t portray at all.
Booker was living with Thaddeus Livingston, the father of Bunny Wailer, the cofounder of the Wailers — the band that catapulted Marley to international fame. Booker wouldn’t tell anyone Bob was her son. “When Bunny and Bob were growing up together, Bob was not treated as one of the family … One day he was holding tightly to [his mother], and she box him away” Joe Higgs, a musician and mentor to Marley, recalled in “So Much Things to Say: The Oral History of Bob Marley.” “He slept beneath the bottom of the house.”
