Bob Marley was born Nesta Robert Marley in 1945 in Nine Mile, a small town situated high in the mountains in Jamaica’s St. Ann Parish. His mother, Jamaican native Cedella Booker, was just 18 when she married Marley’s father, Norval Sinclair Marley. The elder Marley was not Jamaican, originally hailing from England, and was also significantly older than his wife — aged 60 when they wed. The match wasn’t a good one, and Marley’s parents separated soon after he was born.
The elder Marley was apparently not cut out for fatherhood; rarely around and displaying little interest in his son, he was absent for much of Bob Marley’s childhood. Esther Anderson, who was once Marley’s girlfriend, confirmed that Marley’s father was, for all intents and purposes, a non-presence in his childhood. “The guy didn’t exist,” she told BBC News, claiming she only ever saw him in a single photograph. “There was a photograph of him on a horse, a white man on a horse,” she said of Marley’s father. According to Anderson, Marley rarely spoke about his father; when he did, it was with scorn.
“He provided little financial support and seldom saw her and their son,” said Christopher Marley, a member of the white side of Bob Marley’s family, in an interview for the book, “So Much Things to Say: The Oral History of Bob Marley.” He added, “Norval was seriously unstable, to put it mildly.” Norval Marley died in 1955, when his son was just 10.
