A Long-Lost DOJ File on Bob Marley
The 95-page file covers his arrival to the U.S. in 1966 through his treatment for cancer in August 1977.
For a few months now, I’ve been sitting on a long-lost file the U.S. government kept on Bob Marley that I’m not sure anyone else still alive has seen.
It gave me goosebumps.
Pulled through a Freedom of Information Act request made in 1981 (we’ll get to that later) the file contains so many fascinating official documents — his Jamaican passport, visa applications, letters from the U.S. Selective Service, passport photos, letters from his mother’s employers, deportation papers, marriage certificates, letter from his doctor, steno notes. But the document that stopped me in my tracks was a transcript of an interview between Bob and an official at the Department of Justice Immigration and Naturalization Services in Philadelphia on August 17, 1966. It’s possibly the earliest recorded interview (though it’s more of an interrogation) with Bob Marley.
This was four years after Marley made his first recordings in Kingston, Jamaica, but long before he and the Wailers gained any international fame, which came with the release of “Catch A Fire” in 1973. At the time of the DOJ interview, he was 21 and just another immigrant from the Caribbean on the brink of deportation. He was living with his mother, Cedella, and her second husband, by many accounts a kindhearted gentleman named Edward Booker, in Wilmington, Delaware. She had moved there a few years earlier and pleaded for her son to join her. On February 17, 1966, he did.
Yes, Delaware.
Like much of Marley’s short life, his time in Delaware was put under the microscope many times in dozens of articles, blogs, local news segments and even a BBC Radio 4 documentary (“Bob Marley: The Chrysler Year” — again, more later). There’s so much fascination with that period, as there should be. He’s a fish out of water, in Delaware. Not Florida. Not New York. Not New Orleans. But Delaware. The contrast could not be more absurd.
There’s always been heavy conjecture regarding his purpose in moving to Delaware. The prevailing belief is that he intended to earn a good chunk of money to start his own label (Tuff Gong) back in Jamaica. In his mother’s basement, he wrote songs with his guitar and recorded hours of raw demos on cassette tapes. More importantly, his wife, Rita, whom he had married a few days before leaving for the U.S., remained in Kingston. All the more reason for him to return to the island. But according to his answers in this DOJ transcript — which I realize may not reflect his intentions — that wasn’t the goal at all.
When asked why he married Rita — in a small ceremony in Kingston on February 10, 1966 — Marley’s reply in the transcript is: “She was pregnant and she lost the baby, so the best thing I could do was to marry her and try to bring her to the United States.”
Their marriage actually lies at the heart of this interview. The wedding took place several months after Marley received a U.S. visa, which, according to letters that the DOJ sent him, is a violation of U.S. immigration law, subjecting him to deportation. In the DOJ transcript, he’s terse and direct in his answers. His timidity — seemingly very un-Bob Marley — seeps out of his short replies. And that’s one of the things that really struck me while going through this file — his youth.
By now you’re probably thinking: How the hell is this a newsletter?
I don’t know. It might not be a newsletter. I’m typing this in Apple Notes. Maybe it’s a long-ass note. A notesletter? All I know is that I have quite a bit to say about this file and the multiverse that surrounds it. I think they’re important. Not “secret FBI espionage and wiretap” important. It’s more of an asterisk. But there’s plenty to pore over. We’ll go over all of it together and I’ll try my best to provide context into how the file helps us reconsider some aspects of Marley’s life and how it clears up certain parts of the Marley Myth. Because a lot of what we think we know about him is based on myth. I’ve been writing a book on the Chinese-Jamaican producer who discovered Bob Marley — Leslie Kong — and what I’ve learned through my research is that much of the history from that period is gossip. They’re stories that have evolved into legend and then ultimately accepted as some kind of truth, a truth that varies depending on the storyteller. These files establish some factual foundation and then some.
There will be asterisks to this asterisk. And I will definitely go down a few rabbit holes because that is what I do. Who knows what will be on the other side.
Will any of this be useful to you? Maybe? I hope so, eventually. So subscribe to the notesletter and let’s begin. Here’s the interview (below) with some captions and notes — for now. I’ll dig more into some of these notes in the following weeks. And keep in mind that you’re among the first to read the following pages in a long, long time.
See you next week and be sure to tell your friends!