“Now that he is no longer physically here, he has long ago proven them wrong. “When Daddy passed in 1981, the naysayers said that his music and his legacy would be nothing,” she says.

Her father would have been obviously gratified by the fact that his songs have become the whole world’s soundtrack? “The other day I had to go for an MRI scan and the guy put on these headphones for me and of course Three Little Birds came through.”īob Marley and his wife, Rita, with their children, left to right, Sharon, Ziggy, Cedella, and baby Stephen, Jamaica, circa 1972. The music was there in the airport lounge. When we speak she has just arrived in New York from her home in Miami. You can tell the cool stores from not the cool stores by whether they are playing the music,” she says, with a laugh. This morning, at home, it was from a car with an open window playing Waiting in Vain in the street outside). But also in off-duty moments, I imagine hardly an hour goes by without her happening to hear some track (one of the uncanny things about thinking about this story in the past couple of weeks is that every time I have sat down anywhere to work, a Marley track has come on within minutes. I think in some type of dictionary when you look up 'confidence', you will find the words 'Bob Marley'Īs CEO of the “music, merch, publishing” business Tuff Gong that her father established, Cedella, now 53, is obviously surrounded by the songs. But if he was often absent from Cedella’s day-to-day life as she was growing up, he has been ever-present in the 40 years since he died of cancer when he was only 36. That was one time when I was proud to be Bob Marley’s daughter.”īoth those recollections seem to speak to a more complicated relationship with her father than any all-encompassing “One Love” mythology might suggest. “One of my really cool memories is when Michael Jackson and the Jackson Five came to Jamaica. And then, she says, there was the time when she finally won the admiration of her schoolmates, whose parents used to tell them not to mix with the Marley kids, because of Bob’s reputation for “bringing the ghetto uptown”.

Cedella booker