Bob Marley: The Untold Story. Chris Salewicz

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СКАЧАТЬ 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. Like I said, we would just sit down and we would sing. Somebody try to do the bass, I think a guy named Barrington Sales. But he wasn’t strong enough. Then Peter come. And Georgie. Bob would say, “No, mon, that’s not your part.” You know, so everybody would try to sing.’

      Cherry remembered a favourite spot of theirs, by Third Street and West Road, where they would sit and sing on the pavement, ‘by the Branch yard. It’s like the JLP. It’s a place, like a yard where they have meetings, and a youth club.’ Singing with the three of them would be ‘Cardo’ – Ricardo Scott, who eventually moved to the USA, where he gained medical and law degrees.

      Unfortunately, Cherry Smith was unavailable for the first Coxsone Dodd sessions, having a regular well-paid seasonal job with Caribbean Preserving, providing money she needed to keep her 3-year-old daughter. Hence she was not available for the photographs of the line-up that featured Bob, Bunny, Peter, and Beverley Kelso. ‘When Junior Braithwaite left, that’s when I took his space,’ she said. Cherry sang on the recordings of ‘Amen’, ‘Lonesome Feelings’, ‘Maga Dog’, and ‘There She Goes’. But she also thought she sang on ‘I am Going Home’ (which both Bunny and Coxsone believed was recorded in the first session).

      Before studio sessions, all concerned paid assiduous attention to mastering their parts in outdoor rehearsals, lit by a kerosene lamp or a fire, or simply the rays of the moon. ‘We rehearse and we rehearse, rehearse, until we know the song. And they would say, “Well, tomorrow we going up to the studio.” So we all get ready, get dressed and we walked with each other, a long walk. It’s nervous: a lot of people there. And we come back late in the night and we have to walk through this burying ground. ’Cause that’s the shortest way.’

      Cherry Smith always felt that it was Junior Braithwaite who owned the finest voice of them all: ‘Oh yes. He carried.’ But as far as she was concerned, her singing excursions were only for fun – ’cause we didn’t get pay for it. We didn’t get nothing. He give us £5 to buy a dress.’ She and Beverley wore identical dresses for the only live show Cherry Smith played with the Wailers, at the Sombrero, shortly after she had recorded the ‘Maga Dog’ tune with Peter Tosh. As time passed at Studio One, however, the two girls would gradually fall away from the group.

      Before the instant popularity of ‘Simmer Down’ had time truly to translate into sales, Bob found himself onstage as lead singer for the first time at that show at the Sombrero Club in Kingston. At the helm of the Wailers, he steered the group to a performance that stole the event, assisted in great part by the crisp and clear sound that Count Machuki, who had started as a DJ with Coxsone’s sound system, obtained for him at the mixing desk. The audience response was overwhelming, but СКАЧАТЬ