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Songs Of Freedom

SONGS OF FREEDOM:
THE MUSIC OF BOB MARLEY AS
TRANSFORMATIVE EDUCATION
W. Alan Smith, Ph.D.
Florida Southern College,
Lakeland, FL
Open your eyes and look within
Are you satisfied with the life you're living?
We know where we're going; we know where we're from
We're leaving Babylon, we're going to our fatherland.
n Bob Marley, "Exodus", 1977
The music of Robert Nesta Marley, the late Jamaican musician who introduced both reggae
music and Rastafarian religious beliefs to an international audience, combines a "feel good,"
slow-paced rhythm with a militant call for justice and freedom from oppression. Born in the lush
countryside of Jamaica, he moved at a young age to the crushing squalor of Trench Town, one of
Kingston, Jamaica's most hopeless "government yards" where he, like other "Rude Boys"
abandoned formal education for the promise of the street gangs, only to discover music as his
way out of life among the "sufferahs." Bob Marley has been called a prophet, a psalmist for the
Rastafarian religion, an advocate for an African homeland for the descendants of slavery still
struggling to develop a sense of identity in what he called "Babylon," a peace- maker, a troublemaker,
a musical genius, and the first Third World superstar. Marley was a complex man housed
within an apparently simple guise. His speech sounded, to the uninitiated, like the ramblings of a
"pothead" (ganja, or marijuana, was a part of both his religion and his philosophy), yet contained
revelatory and revolutionary truth for those who had ears to hear. The brief quotation from his
1977 hit song, "Exodus" is a case in point: it calls the hearer to self-examination and selfdevelopment
while also pointing metaphorically toward a vision of an African exodus from their
exile in the "Babylon" of western slavery and oppression back to the "fatherland" of Africa.
Marley's music and lyrics were his ways of going about what he called "me Faddah's business."
(White 2000, 306) He...