Bob Marley: The Untold Story - Chris Salewicz

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him a legend. But, according to Dillon, who occasionally played trumpet with the Skatalites, the legend that Bob Marley became was not at that point the main thrust behind the Wailers. Instead, he said, he felt it was Bunny Livingston who was pushing the group along.)

      Beverley Kelso was born on 14 April 1948, the third eldest of three sisters and four brothers, in Jones Town. But when she was three her family moved to 4 Fifth Street in Trench Town. The popular conception of Trench Town as an area of grinding poverty was not the place that Beverley knew: ‘Trench Town people dressed to their best. I would say there wasn’t poor people, because majority of Trench Town people go to high school, they’re educated people.’

      Also on Fifth Street lived Alton Ellis and his family: the entire neighbourhood would gather to watch him and his talented sister Hortense rehearse in their yard. Even at a young age, Beverley Kelso knew something of the art of singing. In the school choir at Denham Town primary school, she was the lead vocalist on the hymns they would perform at morning assembly. The then zenith of her vocal achievements was when she performed solo, singing ‘I Waited for the Lord’ at St Andrew Scots Kirk for Queen Elizabeth II on the 1954 visit to the island by the newly crowned British monarch. ‘I was the first to sing. They didn’t even wait until the song finished, they were just clapping. And then that made me sing for the better.’

      To perform before Queen Elizabeth, Beverley needed to overcome her natural shyness. ‘Sometimes we’d all just sit there on the side of the road and somebody would start to sing something. But I was a quiet one. I never bother. I just shut up and listen. But I loved the singing. But I was so shy. I’m still shy.’

      Ten years after that regal performance, some friends of Beverley persuaded her to accompany them to Chocomo Lawn, the celebrated outdoor dancehall in Denham Town, west Kingston. (Although run in conjunction with Edward Seaga and the JLP, Chocomo’s appeal overrode its political affiliation.) When she arrived there, they asked her to perform, suggesting she sing Patti LaBelle’s ‘Down the Aisle’. And the moment Beverley uttered the opening lines, ‘the fence tear down,’ the crowd pushing forward to see her: this made Beverley so nervous that she started the song all over again.

      The next evening, after she had returned home from school, Beverley was cleaning the kitchen when there was a knock on the door. Bob Marley, who had seen her Chocomo Lawn performance, was standing there. ‘I asked him, “You want somebody?” He said, “Yes, you.” I said, “Me?” And he said, “Yeah, I’d like it if you’d sing a song with me.” So I said, “Well, you’ll have to ask my mother if you want me to sing with you. But my mother is not here now. She went to work.”’

      Beverley had never met Bob before. ‘My first impression of him was ordinary. Ordinary. I didn’t think of him as nobody special. But he was very polite. Never sad. Even that evening he was just smiling. He was just looking at me, like, oh, pretty girl. That’s what I have in my mind.

      ‘When he came back my mother was there. And he asked her and she said, “Yes, but you’ll have to take care of her.” He asked me if I could come and rehearse the same evening.’

      Beverley knew where to go, the fourth yard on Second Street, because her family would buy bread from Sonny and Gertie Hibbert, who lived at 13 Second Street, across the road from a rehearsal yard at 14 Second Street. ‘So I went up and when I went there Peter, Bunny, and Junior was sitting under a tree on a workbench. Bob wasn’t there.’

      Bob had gone off to collect their guitar. When he returned with it, he introduced Beverley to Peter, Bunny, and Junior. But, she emphasised, ‘I didn’t call him Bob and nobody in Trench Town called him Bob. He introduced himself to me as Lester.’ One might assume this to be a misremembering of ‘Nesta’, precisely what had concerned the boy’s mother when his father suggested the name. Yet Cherry Smith – shortly also to be singing with the Wailers – also believed that Bob was called ‘Lester’: had he renamed himself with such a corruption of his original first name? Or is this simply an example of Jamaican word mutation, in which aural misunderstandings translate into such oral errors as ‘Matthews Lane’ being pronounced as ‘Mattress Lane’? It was only shortly afterwards that Rita Anderson first met him, and she insists he was known to all Trench Town as ‘Robbie’. It is worth remembering that, in Jamaica, people are often known by several different names and nicknames – for example, ‘Little’ Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry, the ‘Upsetter’.

      At Beverley Kelso’s evening encounter with ‘Lester’ and his fellow musicians, she immediately began to rehearse ‘Simmer Down’ with them. In rehearsal, ‘Simmer Down’ had seemed like some tough Jamaican variant of the protest ‘message’ songs newly popular in the United States. In the recording studio, however, it became positively transcendent. Popular songs with lines about the running bellies of nanny-goats? This song was not only very unusual, but also tied together by an extremely commercial set of hooks.

      ‘Control your temper/ Simmer down/ The battle will get hotter/ Simmer down,’ declared Bob on what was one of his greatest songs. In the style unique to Coxsone’s label, the voices are buried back in the mix, fighting to get out with the same ferocity with which they had tried to liberate themselves from the dead-end of the ghetto. Could the vocal sound have been a reflection of the studio conditions? On the ‘Simmer Down’ session, Bob Marley stood directly in front of the microphone, flanked on either side by Bunny and Peter, forming a half-circle, their faces almost touching. Coxsone himself engineered the recording on his portable one-track that he unplugged and took home at the end of the session.

      Also providing backing vocals – though not on the earliest recording sessions – was Cherry Smith. Cherry was born Ermine Bramwell in Upper Trench Town on 22 August 1943, although the family soon moved to Jones Town. ‘Green’ was her half-brother’s surname, which she took when her father died in 1958, after which they moved to Second Street in Trench Town. Her father, a dentist, had been relatively affluent, and the family had a large radiogram in the house, ideal for listening every Saturday night to the latest hit tunes on Duke Reid’s radio show – she would turn it up loud so that all the neighbours could hear. Her musical Trench Town neighbours included Lascelles Perkins, Alton Ellis and his sister Hortense, Jimmy Tucker, a group called the Schoolboys, which included ‘Pipe’ Matthews and ‘Bread’ MacDonald, later of the Wailing Souls, and the ubiquitous Higgs and Wilson.

      At the Baptist Church Sunday School she would sing songs such as ‘Let the Lord be Seen in You’, which she would later record with the Wailers for Coxsone Dodd. Yet it was in American popular music that lay her main musical love: ‘Harry Belafonte, Nat King Cole, Duke Ellington, and all those kind of big-band people.’

      One day Joe Higgs heard Cherry’s voice, as she copied a recent American hit tune whilst she washed clothes in the yard. ‘My voice was way up there and he stopped immediately. He said, “Cherry, that’s you?” So I said, “Yeah.” We used to listen to him and he would tell us little things,’ she said.

      Another figure in the area familiar to her was the Marley boy: ‘All the little girls used to like him. Nice boy. He was funny. Cracking jokes. Teasing. He used to be shy, though.’ She recalled a significant sobriquet that was given to him: ‘We used to call him “Little White Boy”, cos his hair was curly.’ Rather than offering a judgement, the nickname seemed to be one of affection: contrary to the myth, Cherry does not believe that being a ‘browning’, as mixed-race individuals are frequently known in Jamaica, led the teenage Bob Marley to be picked on in any way. ‘We was all kids. We grew up with all different people. There was two Chinese boy, they live in the Bronx now. They had a grocery shop there right in front of where they guys used to rehearse. Mr Lee’s.’

      But Cherry was struck by Bob’s appearance, hardly that of a ragamuffin ghetto boy: Nesta and Bunny, she said, ‘used to dress nice in the Fifth Avenue shoes and nice shirt.’ Peter, she remembered, invariably would be with them: ‘Peter come with his guitar. Peter was always feisty, he had an attitude. Bossy, mouthy, oh yes. Full of joke.’ More than the other two, Peter came the closest to personifying high-spirited pushiness. Not once, for example, did Cherry recall Nesta getting into a fight; invariably she saw him out with Bunny: ‘You always see both of them together. They were polite, well-mannered, intelligent.

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