Forty years ago, three young Jamaicans walked into the offices of Island Records and sat down to make a deal with Chris Blackwell. No money changed hands that day or was even talked about. It would have sullied the perfect moment, Blackwell recalled. For Chris Blackwell recognized that when Peter...

When Bob Marley died in 1981, by then the holy trinity of Marley, Tosh and Livingston, the original gang of three Wailers had been broken. Island Records knew that despite the laterrivalry Tosh and Marley had been inseparably close friends. An Island official rang Tosh to tell him the sad...

Lightning flashed and thunder crackled to the booming Reggae baseline as Bob Marley with dreadlocks flailing cried out again and again: "We're going to unite! We gotta unite!" It was 1978; Jamaica was in the throes of near civil war. To underscore his message, Marley summoned the prime minister, Michael...

The face of Bob Marley adorns millions of T-shirts and posters around the globe and wherever you are in the world, you're probably not far from the pulsing sound of one of his signature songs. Having been groomed by Chris Blackwell, the boss of Island Records, and marketed as a...

My skin is black but for some people it's not black enough. Ordinarily, I can dip below the radar and get through life without being rumbled. My mistake was to write a biography of Marcus Garvey.

At a time in the 20th century when Negroes believed themselves despised, the flamboyant...