Roots, Rock, Reggae

The Zoo Crew has got the turntable warmed up and the needle is riding "Roots, Rock, Reggae," the sweet second cut off Bob Marley and the Wailers' 1976 album Rastaman Vibration, and if you Zoo Freaks are not already skanking in the kitchen, you are missing the point of the whole evening on THE ZOO. This is the record where Bob stopped whispering to the faithful and started talking straight to the radio guys. The chorus is a love letter and a dare at the same time. "Play I on the R&B," he sings, "want all my people to see, we bubblin' on the Top 100, just like a mighty dread." He was not hiding the request. He wanted American programmers to treat reggae like the cousin of soul it already was, and he wrapped the ask in a melody so light you could hum it after one pass.

The funny part, the part the old hands still grin about, is that the song went and did exactly what it asked for. "Roots, Rock, Reggae" is the only Bob Marley single that ever cracked the Billboard Hot 100, peaking at number 51. The album itself, released on April 30, 1976, was the first and only Marley studio set to reach the American Top 10, settling in at number 8, and it climbed to number 15 in Britain. Guitarist Donald Kinsey, who came aboard for the overdubs and then stayed on the road, told the story years later in a way that still gives a room goosebumps. They were overdubbing at Criteria in Miami, the sessions loose and natural, every take feeling like it might be the one. Then the tour hit Chicago, Kinsey grabbed a Billboard the way he did in every city, and there it was, bubbling on the Top 100, just like the lyric had promised. He called it a prophecy. For a band that had spent a decade as a cult concern, that little chart line felt like the door finally swinging open.

Rastaman Vibration sits in a strange, beautiful pocket. The live album from the Lyceum had already made "No Woman, No Cry" a household hum in Britain, and Exodus was still a year away. In between, Bob and the band cut this one in Kingston through the late months of 1975 and the early months of 1976, mostly at Harry J's and Joe Gibbs, then mixed it in Miami with Family Man Barrett and Chris Blackwell sharing the board. The Barrett brothers are the engine, Carlton on the drums and Aston on the bass, and the I-Threes, Rita Marley, Marcia Griffiths and Judy Mowatt, float the harmonies. Saxophone lines drift through the track like a warm breeze off the harbor. Neville Garrick's cover, that rough hemp-looking jacket with the portrait worked into the texture, still looks like something you would find leaning against a wall in a Hope Road room.

The writing credit is its own little saga. On the original sleeve "Roots, Rock, Reggae" was handed to Vincent Ford, the same wheelchair-bound friend who ran a soup kitchen in Kingston and who had already been listed on "No Woman, No Cry." Rita Marley and the Barretts picked up credits elsewhere on the album. A long fight with the old publishing company Cayman Music sat underneath all of it. In 1987 a court finally ruled that the songs on this record, like the songs on the others, had been written by Bob, and the credits were moved to the estate after he was gone. Ford was a real friend and a real help in the lean years. The soup kitchen kept people fed. The credit was a way of looking after him. The court just wanted the paperwork to match the pen.

Out on the road the song grew legs. The American run opened in Pennsylvania in late April of 1976, then the band crossed to Europe and settled into the Hammersmith Odeon in London for six shows in four days that June. Booking that room was a bold move, but "No Woman, No Cry" had already given them a crowd that would fill it. A previously unreleased recording from those nights later surfaced as Roots, Rock, Reggae: Live at the Hammersmith Odeon, with liner notes from Don Letts, and the title track stretches out past five minutes, the band leaning into the groove while the room sings the radio plea back at them. Rolling Stone had called the album an inconsistent stand halfway between revolution and the Hot 100. The revolution was on "War," which set Haile Selassie's 1963 United Nations speech to music, and on "Crazy Baldhead." The Hot 100 half was this song, and the band was perfectly happy to stand in both places at once.

To get how a man writes a song that politely asks the radio to play him, you have to go back to a yard in St. Ann and a government yard in Kingston. Robert Nesta Marley was born on February 6, 1945, in the village of Nine Mile. His mother, Cedella Booker, sang spirituals and wrote songs of her own. Asked in 1975 how he got started, Bob said he did not really know, except that his mother was a singer, spiritual, like a gospel singer, and he heard her first and just loved music and grew with it. A cousin handed him a guitar made of bamboo and goatskin. He and his friend Neville Livingston, later Bunny Wailer, sang whatever drifted in on the Miami station and the Cuban stations, Fats Domino, Ricky Nelson, the Drifters. American rhythm and blues mixed with Jamaican mento was already turning into ska, and the boys wanted in.

By his early teens he was back in West Kingston, in Trench Town, the kind of place people compared to an open drain. His mother set him up as an apprentice welder. One of the fellows in the yard was Desmond Dekker, already writing songs and already heading for a hit with "Honour Your Mother and Father." Dekker told him to come down to Beverley's. Bob met Jimmy Cliff, took the audition, and in 1962, still seventeen, cut "Judge Not" for producer Leslie Kong at Federal Studios, a ska bounce built on a saying he had learned from his grandfather: judge not, before you judge yourself. The single did not set the island on fire. He liked the song anyway. Welding, he decided, was too hard.

Around the same time he, Bunny and Winston Hubert McIntosh, the man who became Peter Tosh, were sitting in quiet corners of Trench Town harmonizing. They tried on names, the Teenagers, the Wailing Rudeboys, before they settled on the Wailers. Bob later said they started out crying, which is where the name came from, and another time he tied it to the Bible. Joe Higgs coached the voices. Beverly Kelso and Junior Braithwaite passed through. In December 1963 they walked into Coxsone Dodd's Studio One and cut "Simmer Down," a rude-boy warning Bob had already used to win a talent contest. It became a Jamaican hit, and the long apprenticeship was on. Ska cooled into rocksteady, rocksteady into reggae, the original trio split and reformed and split again, Lee Perry and the Upsetters years came and went, and Island Records eventually put the later Wailers in front of the world. By the time Rastaman Vibration arrived, Peter and Bunny had stepped off to make Legalize It and Blackheart Man, and Bob was the name on the marquee, with Family Man, Carly, Tyrone Downie, Al Anderson, and the I-Threes behind him.

That is the road this song is standing on. A boy who learned melody from his mother, who traded a welding torch for a studio door because a friend in the yard told him to try, who spent fifteen years convincing Jamaica and then the rest of the world that the music from Trench Town belonged on the same dial as the soul stations. "Roots, Rock, Reggae" is the moment he said it out loud, in a tune you can dance to, and the charts, for once, answered back. The Zoo Crew will let it ride a little longer. If you want the whole story the family still keeps, the official home is Bob Marley, where the Rastaman Vibration pages still list "Roots, Rock, Reggae" right under "Positive Vibration." The crew posts on Facebook, Instagram and X, and the fans keep a big room of their own over at the Bob Marley Fan Club group. Put the needle back at the start. Play I on the radio. That is all he asked.