Bob Marley in Light of the Proverbs

[this is the rough draft—see ROJAH APRIL 99 for revised version)

If, as Nathaniel Murrell and Lewin Williams point out, that “it is almost impossible to discuss any Rastafarian doctrine without reference to Scripture,” it might be said that a fullness of understanding of the music of Bob Marley is similarly thwarted without reference to his sources, chief among them the Bible. The Biblical grounding of Marley’s music, it seems, doesn’t play as well as beer-lizards padding along on television to the sound of “Jamming” or the touristification of his life as we find in the form of a replica of his home on display in Florida. Not surprisingly, Marley’s songs survival, uprising and confrontation reflect the language of contrast and the themes of Proverbs in ways which remain under-acknowledged[i]. His songs, from as early as 1963 till the end of his life, bear the mark and the residue of the book of Proverbs.

Reports of Bob Marley and the Wailers concert tours abound with instances of the band and crew on the road busing it to the next show and breaking out the Bibles for reasonings. For the rock journalists covering the band, the message-driven music of Rastafari --- held attraction for those outside his community, too.] Marley was known to answer journalists with Biblical references, preferring the loftier perches of Rasta reasoning to simply flogging his musical product, and was characterized as a prophet when in fact Marley would be better styled as a Rasta Everyman. As a Rastafarian, in other words with a worldview guided in large part by the Bible, Bob Marley read Scripture and reasoned about it with his compatriots. Rastas inject Biblical citations and themes into everyday discourse, seeing their roles, individually and collectively, as the new Israelites, beating down Babylon and effecting cultural, if not physical, repatriation to Africa. Rastafari reasonings never lack inspired correlation between Biblical text and current events large and small. This worldview involves Biblical dramaturgy—that is, the erasure of the boundaries of time and space. The struggles described in the Bible are the struggles of today’s black Diaspora. More to the point, the Bible is studied as history and prophecy. When Marley sang, “Don’t forget your history / Know your destiny,” he was blending a pan-Africanism formed by Marcus Garvey with a Biblical dimension.

Musically, the Rastafari manifest a highly developed skill of appropriation, dipping their cups into many wells. Protestant Christianity gave them their Bible, pocomania gave them their hand percussion, . There is certainly more, for all of these sources interact. The Melodians’ “Rivers of Babylon,” a song of exile adapted from Psalm 137, is the most famous instance of a practice whose examples number like the sands on seashore. One motif of that Psalm (“Let the words of our mouth and the meditation of our heart be acceptable in thy sight, o Jah”) recurs in Proverbs, that of connecting our hearts to our physical senses. In it, Solomon, who is about to deliver instructions and warnings, instructs his son to heed his words. It is a proverb of holistic thought, of words, senses and soul: “Let them not depart from thine eyes; keep them in the midst of thine heart.” Marley began his recording career with something drawn from the Bible: “Judge Not,” recorded in 1962 when Marley was but 17?, anchored in Matthew 7:1-2: “Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.” The theme of retribution for the wicked and the promise of deliverance and redemption for “the sufferahs” are constant motifs in the Bible. Proverbs is rife with references:

The theme that injustice pervades is the subject of 13:23: “Much food is in the tillage of the poor: but there is that is destroyed for want of judgment”. “swept away by injustice” The Rastafari largely drew from the ranks of the marginalized poor, at least until the 1970s, and Marley’s identification with the poor never ceased. He politicized the personalized the encounter in “I Shot the Sheriff.” In that song Sheriff John Brown lies in wait to destroy: “Every time I plant a seed / He seh kill it before it grows.” There are seeds of liberation theology within the Proverbs: “He that oppresseth the poor reproacheth his Maker, but he that honoreth him hath mercy on the poor” (14:31).

Secondarily, Jamaican religious ritual and worship include hymns spawned from the Bible. Marley hardly saw the inside of a Christian church, but he was part of a peasant culture steeped in the doctrine, ritual, symbols and music from the Christian churches. In Jamaica, religious affiliation breaks down to two-thirds European- or North American-derived and one-third African-derived religious practice. Complicating census takers is the fact that many Jamaicans hold “dual membership”; at any rate, many have more than passing familiarity with differing religions. Bob’s mother and grandfather, the two adults in the family who did the lion’s share of Bob’s upbringing, read the Bible at home; his mother attended church [dates]. Early Wailers music quite naturally took churchical directions. “Amen,” “—“

It was the Rastafari emphasis on Bible reading and reasoning—a chapter a day recommended for spiritual sustenance—which . University of West Indies-Mona scholar Barry Chevannes says, “The most central institution of resistance in Jamaica”—which had the highest number of slave revolts in slave society—“has been religion” (Worldviews 1). Used the weapon of the oppressor by reinterpreting the Bible in resistance. For instance, the Rastafari argue passionately that their controversial use of herb, i.e. ganja, has textual support in the Bible, where any citation of “herbs” signals for the manifest evidence justifying their use of ganja in ritual, social and [diet] situations. Passages in Genesis (9:3) and Revelation (22:2: herb is given to man by the Creator “for the healing of the nations”) are usually the first to be cited. Proverbs 15:17 comes as ancillary support for the Rastafari line of reasoning: “Better is a dinner of herbs where love is than a stalled [i.e. fatted] ox and hatred therewith” well suits the Rasta ideal wherein love and “livity”— predicated on a healthful diet— are defined through organic abundance of the earth.

Structurally, Marley was no doubt attracted to the book of Proverbs because epigrams hinge on antithesis, typified in the book of Proverbs by the following verse: “He who is steadfast in righteousness will live, but he who pursues evil will die” (11:19). Thematically—spiritually—so much of Rastafari rides on antithesis and inversion; the new millennium. [citation] . That structure and theme continually recur in Proverbs. The wise and the foolish, the slothful and the diligent, the ubiquitous “light of the righteous” versus the snuffed “lamp of the wicked,” knowledge vs. folly—these are flashpoints of struggle

Proverbial Wisdom

A proverb—small “p”—is common coin in any culture. “Proverbs often serve to widen the significance of a particular incident or situation,” says Mervyn Morris in his introduction to a selection of poems by Jamaica’s Louise Bennett. They distill generations of experience and so tend to suggest that their difficulty or occasion for joy is not new. The occasion for a proverb—the “teachable moment,” one might says—is part of the flow of communal experience. “Beautiful woman, beautiful trouble” is one from Jamaican culture with cross-cultural reach. “Before you marry keep you two eye open: after you marry, shut one” is another[ii]. “Time longer than rope.”

Marley lyrics were consistently proverbial. In her chapter on Marley in Noises in the Blood, Carolyn Cooper comments on “Who the Cap Fit,” which as she notes uses “riddling proverb” to make a point about hypocrisy: “Man to man is so unjust … Who the cap fit let them wear it.” Tellingly, Marley has a cunningly neutral proverb—“Me say me throw me corn/Me no call no fowl”—to which he follows with a taunting, onomatopoeic “I saying cok, cok, cok, yeah/cluk, cluk, cluk,” an audacious bit of oral performance.

Wisdom of the Proverbs

At its heart Proverbs advances the quest for wisdom and understanding. [quote here] The Rastafari are known to reconfigure that language as “wis-man” (as opposed to “wis-dumb”) and “overstanding,” for one dimension of their counter-culture is a deconstruction and reconstruction of language. The purpose of a Proverb is to teach, to provoke thought, rather than to argue the rightness of its teaching.

At the same time, Proverbs is a guide to creativity. “Whoso loveth instruction loveth knowledge: but he that hateth reproof is brutish” (12:1). More than once we are counseled to resist overstatement. Proverbs 17:27 (“He that hath knowledge spareth his words”) and the near equivalent 25:4 (“Take away the dross from the silver, and there shall come forth a vessel for the finer”) are instructive statements about the craft of writing; song writing, moreover, has the task of attracting and retaining listeners within the context of a three- or five-minute song. Many of the tools of lyric writing are found in the rhetoric of the Proverbs, including personification (wisdom and understanding speak on their own behalf to the foolish) and allegory (the story of their quest). To the ethical by way of the esthetic, to paraphrase Juan de Mareina (Machado 16).

Proverbs’ recurring themes about wisdom and understanding rest, for one thing, in the repeated better-than statements, which provide the wide dimensions of its moral map. (To let one example stand for many: “A good name is rather to be chosen than great riches” [22:1]) The book

Proverbs contains the promise of retribution for the wicked (chapter/verse), the adulterer (6:29, 32-33) and the false witness (19:5), for it correspondingly contends that for the moral inversion to exist (e.g. “…a poor man is better than a liar” [19:22]) there must be an unseen order of things wherein action and ideal are harmonized, cause being one with the effect. “He that getteth wisdom loveth his own soul” (19:8). “A false witness shall not be unpunished, and he that speaketh lies will perish” (19:9). Both argue God’s ultimate deliverance:.

It must be said, too, that the book of Proverbs injects the odd absorbing narrative . 7:6 begins a tale of the speaker witnessing an encounter between son (“void of understanding”) and fallen woman. Her wiles , and the tale ends with what seems to be a rush to judgment, or at least an overheated conclusion: “He follows her as an ox goeth to the slaughter” (7:22). A cautionary tale.

The Proverbs in Marley’s Music

“Mr. Talkative” in 1963.

Proverbs also offers the more severe / The ordering of the Rastafari cosmology owes much to the themes embedded in Proverbs. “He that keepeth the commandment keepeth his own soul; but he that despiseth his ways shall die” (19:16).

“The name of the Lord is a strong tower” (18:10). Perhaps it was Proverbs supplied the guiding metaphor when Marley recorded “Haile Selassie Is the Chapel,” a homage to Jah Rastafari. The theme that the strength of God falls to the strong believer finds many instances in the Bible—and in at least one of the hymns in the Sankey, a primary source of hymns in the Jamaican churches[iii].

This gorgeous and austere hymn of praise, with gospel vocals, acoustic guitar and nyabinghi drums, has a knotty context. Marley was the last of his closest allies to “sight up” Rastafari. Rasta linchpin Mortimo Planner wrote his own lyrics for the rhythm and melody of “Crying in the Chapel,” the ---penned song . Elvis Presley had charted with it in 1965. In 1968[iv], Bob sang, “Take your troubles to Selassie”

He’s the only king of kings

Conquering Lion of Judah

Triumphantly we all must sing (all must sing, all must sing)

I search and I search [?]

In the revelation, look what I find

Haile Selassie is the Chapel

Proverbs 26:27 (“Whoso diggeth a pit shall fall therein; and he that rolleth a stone, it will return upon him”) supplies the key line, the promise of retribution, in the Wailers’ “Small Axe.” In that Lee Perry production the Wailers allegorized the fall of the “big t[h]ree,” i.e. the three most powerful record companies in Jamaica. Also 22:8: “He that soweth iniquity shall reap vanity: and the rod of his anger shall fail.”

In 1969/70, the Wailers cut four songs in Kingston for producer Ted Pouder, including the single “Adam and Eve” b/w “Wisdom,” the latter working from three Proverbs: “The rich man’s wealth is in his strong city: the destruction of the poor is their poverty” (10:15), which is developed later, “The rich man’s wealth is in his strong city and as an high wall in its own conceit. Before destruction the heart of man is haughty, and before honor is humility” (18:11-12). “The lips of the righteous feed many: but fools die for want of wisdom” (10:21). Years later, Marley recast the song as “Stiff-Necked Fools,” which appeared posthumously on Confrontation (1983). Peter Tosh returned to the song in his own solo career, transforming it as a long austere ballad titled “Fools Die” on Wanted: Dread or Alive (1981).

“Where no counsel is, the people fall; but in a multitude of counselors there is safety” (11:14). Same cadence and structure as “In an abundance of water the fool is thirsty,” an aphorism in Marley’s “Rat Race” in 1976. Thematically, Marley never lost interest in this proverb. One of the many songs he had in a state of partial completion was a political statement called. “Can’t take your slogans”: Wipe off the paint and the slogans on the street / Confusing’ the people…”)

In 25:24, “It is better to live in a corner of the housetop than with a brawling woman and in a wide house,” Marley clearly saw himself when he used it for the very personal “Running Away,” which appears on Kaya (1978). After the attempt on his life in December 1976, Marley left the island for 14 months, the longest period he spent from Jamaica, and relocated in England. There, his recording sessions yielded first Exodus in 1977, then Kaya the next year.

8:11 reads “Wisdom is better than rubies.” --song reference Zion Train

The Proverbs in Marley’s Worldview

Again and again there is the image of water, endlessly signifying and purifying. “The words of man’s mouth are as deep waters, the wellspring of wisdom as a flowing brook” (18:4). Water typifies in richly meaningful ways what Rastafari call the power of the word-sound. The most obvious example from the text that water and thought are linked is found in 20:5: “Counsel in the heart of man is like deep water.”

Water-as-image builds in power when set in relation to the act of speech. “Death and life are in the power of the tongue” (18:21) is arguably the most critical verse of the book of Proverbs. The death at issue here is spiritual, a matter of being, as much as it is a physical threat, as becomes clear from 21:16: “A man that wandereth out of the way of understanding shall remain in the congregation of the dead.”

“The memory of the just is blessed” (10:7).

Proverbs are not without thorny theological difficulties, such as the . We are threatened with a profound spiritual malaise to accept on one hand that God is manifest in history and the evidence from all our senses that justice is too frequently wanting in it on the other. At these junctures we are enjoined to choose between humankind and God. But the drift of this theological dilemma does not seem to blow the way of the Rastafari, who find in Jah the bedrock of righteousness and in hummankind the disharmony and injustice which [hampers progress].

When he sang “half the story has never been told” in “Get Up Stand Up,” Marley might have plucked a bit of a Sankey which has the same title. We are left to wonder how extensively he would continue to mine the sources of spirituality in his culture. In this last example, we find that Marley was also providing us with a statement about his own catalog of spiritually anchored material. According to Marley researchers Roger Steffens and Leroy Pierson, at least an album’s worth of Wailers spirituals lie in the vault, waiting their release.

Sources used in the preparation of this article include the liner notes to Selassie Is the Chapel, the second disc of The Complete Wailers 1967-1972 Part I; My Life and the Story of the Gospel Hymns by Ira D. Sankey (New York: AMS Press, 1907, 1974); .

Noises in the Blood by Carolyn Cooper (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995).

Finally, a variety of helpful comments came from DG Myers of Texas A&M University and Roger Steffens.