(ANSA) - ROME, MAY 10 - Bob Marley died on the morning of May 11, 1981 at the Cedar of Lebanon Hospital in Miami, cancer had not allowed him to see his Jamaica for the last time.
He was only 36 years old.
Even 40 years after his premature death, the Bob Marley icon continues to radiate his power.
In many respects "Tuff Gong", the nickname that had earned itself in the streets of Trenchtown, the Kingstondove ghetto had grown up, is a unique figure in musical history and not only in the 1900s: the son of a white father and a black girl, from " half blood "discriminated against has become a political and spiritual leader for Jamaica, was the first superstar of third world music, it is difficult to find in the folk music chronicles a character who managed to convey such a message of brotherhood and peace, making it so clear the transcendent capacity of a concert.
Marley performed with Reggae an operation comparable to the work of evolution and popularization carried out by the Beatles on Pop: to be brief, the world discovered and learned to love Reggae thanks to him. a time span that goes from 1965, debut with the Wailers, to 1980, continue to end up unclassified with each reissue.
A story like this cannot be explained only with musical arguments: it was his personality as a natural leader that made the difference, making him truly an artist who had a mission where a profound religiosity, was a convinced Rastafari, married with an equally profound political conscience in a small island. devastated by poverty.
In that apparently simple music there is another place that has a universal language, which almost by osmosis has established a contact between the sounds of the South of the World but at the same time has deep roots in the music of the years to come, from the most sophisticated operations to commercial products.
Italy immediately loved Bob Marley and the Reggae deeply, assimilating in the collective soul that message of peace, love, equality, freedom. (HANDLE).