Greg Stepanich

Robert Nesta Marley, O.M., composer

On this day 25 years ago, the Jamaican songwriter and political activist Bob Marley died of cancer in Miami. He was only 36 years old.

I'm not sufficiently grounded in either Jamaican or African politics to venture any sort of opinion on what his long-term impact has been in those realms, though at least as far as Africa goes, he would still have had plenty to write about today.

Although Marley worked in popular music, which tends to be collaborative rather than solitary even when the artist is by him or herself, I think there's a good case to be made for the king of reggae as a melodist, and a significant one. Melody is crucial to the success of most music, whether we like to admit it or not, and despite all the fine music that's been written without particularly good tunes.

In Marley's case, his music is even more popular today than it was when he was alive, and there's not just one for reason for that. But one of the reasons that gets overlooked is the excellence of his melodies. They are plain melodies, harmonized often in dark minor keys, and they don't head off in surprising directions, either.

And yet they do what great melodies are supposed to do: They carry the song's message in a way that won't let go of your ears. I'm listening right now to Survival, one of my favorite Marley records, and I'm struck by how relatively simple but powerful these songs are. They are angry songs, defiant songs, but withal they are sweet and memorable because the melodies are so good.

You don't find that with any other reggae artist that I can think of, though there are fine tunes here and there; when I do hear new reggae these days (often on WLRN), it's interesting music but not particuarly memorable. I'm sure it's out there, but I haven't run into it recently. I'd be the first to admit I'm not following it all that much these days.

That doesn't detract from my point, which is that the continued popularity and durability of the music of Bob Marley comes at least in part from the music itself, not the fierce message, not the rebel iconography, not the piety. It comes from Marley's ability to string a memorable line of song on top of basic harmonies, and thereby take a form of Jamaican popular music into the stratosphere.

One song in particular illustrates for me Marley's basic inclination to melody, and that is Redemption Song, beloved not only of many cover artists, but half-skilled guitar players everywhere who like to bang through it. In the chorus, he sings:

Won't you help to sing/These songs of freedom/Cause all I ever had/Redemption songs...

The word "redemption" is set to a melody (it's in G, by the by) that scans it this way: Re-daym-uh-SHUN songs. That "shun" falls on what we call the "and of 4" and holds over into the "and of 1." Few of the cover artists sing it that way because it's hard to understand (though I'm sure some do), and while I'm not an expert in Jamaican argot, I don't think it's pronounced that way in Caribbean English.

But if you've got a good tune in your head, the words are just going to have to fit. And that's what Bob Marley was thinking of first there, even if he wrote it all at once. It was the melody that was guiding the song, not the words.

That's what it sounds like to me, anyway. I'm sure there are many who will disagree. But on this sad anniversary, I wanted to point out how important the art of melody is to songwriting, say that it's actually a rare ability, and to add that Robert Nesta Marley, O.M., was one of its masters, and that explains a lot about why his music continues to catch a fire.