Robert "Bob" Nesta Marley OM (February 6, 1945 – May 11, 1981) was a Jamaican musician, born in the small village of Nine Mile in Saint Ann Parish, Jamaica as Nesta Robert Marley. A Jamaican passport official would later swap his first and middle names. His father Norval Sinclair Marley was a white Scottish Jamaican. Norval was a Marine officer and captain, as well as a plantation overseer, when he married Cedella Booker, a black Jamaican then eighteen years old. Norval provided financial support for his wife and child, but seldom saw them, as he was often away on trips.
In 1955, when Marley was 10 years old, his father died of a heart attack at age 60. Marley suffered racial prejudice as a youth, because of his mixed racial origins and faced questions about his own racial identity throughout his life. He once reflected: ...I don't have prejudice against meself. My father was a white and my mother was black. Them call me half-caste or whatever. Me don't dip on nobody's side. Me don't dip on the black man's side nor the white man's side. Me dip on God's side, the one who create me and cause me to come from black and white...
In July 1977, Marley was found to have acral lentiginous melanoma, a form of malignant melanoma, in a football wound - according to widely held urban legend, inflicted by broadcaster and pundit Danny Baker- on his right big toe. Marley refused amputation, because of the Rastafari belief that the body must be "whole." Marley may have seen medical doctors as samfai (tricksters, deceivers). True to this belief Marley went against all surgical possibilities and sought out other means that would not break his religious beliefs. He also refused to register a will, based on the Rastafari belief that writing a will is acknowledging death as inevitable, thus disregarding the everlasting (or everliving, as Rastas say) character of life.
While flying home from Germany to Jamaica for his final days, Marley became ill, and landed in Miami for immediate medical attention. He died at Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in Miami, Florida on the morning of May 11, 1981 at the age of 36. The spread of melanoma to his lungs and brain caused his death. His final words to his son Ziggy were "Money can't buy life."[16] Marley received a state funeral in Jamaica on May 21, 1981 which combined elements of Ethiopian Orthodoxy and Rastafari tradition. He was buried in a chapel near his birthplace with his Gibson Les Paul and a Bible. A month before his death, he was awarded the Jamaican Order of Merit. Bob Marley had 13 children.
