How Bob Marley Fed the Poor

On May 11, 1981, Jamaican musician Bob Marley — only 38 years old — passed away after a bout with cancer. His legacy, however, was already well enshrined. Marley was a musical pioneer, bringing reggae music to the world. He had a dozen hits which are still popular today — Three Little Birds, Could You Be Loved, Is This Love, Jamming, and many more are familiar to generations of music lovers.

And because of his success — and a contract he wanted to get out of — thousands of Jamaicans living in poverty ultimately had a place to get a hot meal.

Marley began his music career in 1962 at the age of 17, and early in his career — likely in the late 1960s — he signed a songwriting contract with a man named Danny Sims, the principal of a small Jamaican music producer called Cayman Music. The terms of the contract weren’t great for Marley and as his fame grew, he found better offers available. In 1972, Marley and his band, Bob Marley and the Wailers, signed with Island Records and its founder, Chris Blackwell. Blackwell, not Sims, is widely considered the producer who helped launch Marley and the Wailers to stardom.

Sims sold most of his rights to Marley’s works to Blackwell but retained an interest in any of Marley’s songwriting through 1976. Marley wasn’t thrilled by that — Sims wasn’t doing anything to help Marley and the Wailers by that point — and, per the Independent, “he did not want his new songs to be associated with Cayman.” His solution, as the Independent further explains, was sneaky and elegant: “In all probability, [Marley] put them in the names of his wife, Rita, the Wailers or other close friends to find a way around tight publishing restrictions.” Sims and Cayman wouldn’t be entitled to any money from the songs, but of course, neither would Marley — his friends and family would get the royalties, not him. But that was fine with Marley; as the Independent notes, “this spreading out of writing credits would also have allowed Marley to provide lasting help to family and close friends.”

And, it turned out, it also helped some of Jamaica’s poorest.

One of Marley’s stand-in songwriters was a longtime friend of his, Vincent “Tata” Ford. Ford was a few years older than Marley and ran a soup kitchen in the Trenchtown neighborhood of Kingston, the capital of Jamaica — one that inspired a lyric on one of Marley’s most notable songs. The New York Times explains:

[Ford] used a wheelchair for decades after losing his legs to diabetes, but according to a Jamaican newspaper, he saved another youth from drowning when he was 14. He was also responsible for saving Marley from starvation as a teenager. The “government yard in Trenchtown” described in “No Woman, No Cry” was No. 3 First Street, where Mr. Ford operated a simple kitchen, known as the Casbah, in one of several communal concrete dwellings built around courtyards in the public housing development there.

In thanks for this and their longtime friendship, Marley assigned the songwriting credits to No Woman, No Cry to Ford, even though few people believe that Ford did any of the actual songwriting. Sims wasn’t happy about this, of course — he brought an ultimately unsuccessful lawsuit against the Marley estate for the broader songwriting ruse.

But perhaps Sims should have exempted Ford’s royalties from that lawsuit. It turned out that Ford wasn’t using his royalties from the song to pad his own pockets — he was using them to continue to help his community. As Rolling Stone reported, “Although many credit Marley with actually writing the song, with the royalties Ford received from the long-lasting success (and non-stop covers and samples) of No Woman, No Cry, Ford reportedly used the money to ensure that his soup kitchen would stay open.” Ford passed away in 2009, but the royalty money keeps coming in, and as of 2021, the soup kitchen was still operating.

Bonus fact: In the late 1990s and early 2000s, rock stars Fred Durst of the band Limp Bizkit and Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails got into a very public spat, insulting one another in a series of interviews. Durst and Limp Bizkit decided to extend the feud to their actual music. The song “Hot Dog” from their 2000 album “Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavored Water” — which uses the F-word a lot, so please don’t play it at work — is a “diss track” designed to insult Nine Inch Nails. As a result, “Hot Dog” makes a lot of references to lyrics in Nine Inch Nails songs, and as Louder Sound reports, that backfired on Durst: the use of Nine Inch Nails lyrics was “so exhaustive [ . . . ] that Reznor actually ended up getting a writing credit for Hot Dog,” and related royalties. (The song isn’t very popular so it’s not a lot of money, but still.)

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