Watch the full video interview Author, musician and Jamaican native Kwame Dawes served as the keynote speaker for the recent "Redemption Song: A Tribute to Bob Marley, Lyrical Poet of the People" presentation at Medgar Evers College, CUNY in Brooklyn on March 31 at the campus' Center for Black Literature. It didn't take long for him to explain his very personal connection to the power of Bob's music and legacy.
"Clearly I've studied his music," said Dawes, "and I feel it's worthy of study, because lyrically, it's profound and complex," said Dawes who wrote the book Bob Marley, Lyrical Genius and joined writer and BobMarley.com contributor Christopher John Farley, author Vivien Goldman, moderator Colin Channer and Marley confidante and memorabilia collector Dera Tompkins in the program.
"I grew up with this music," said Dawes. "I have memories that connect literally to this music. I can hear a song and start crying just thinking about that connection. It's the soundtrack of my growing up in the 1970s in Jamaica. So all of those dimensions are part of what makes my connection to reggae."
Students at Medgar Evers were treated to four hours of discussion on the cultural, political and spiritual elements of Bob's music and his influence on other musicians. The panel, sponsored by the college's Center for Black Literature, the National Black Writers Conference, the Caribbean American Chamber of Commerce and the college's English department, was followed by a concert that featured the Imani Dancers and reggae artists Taj Weekes and Adowa. Tompkins noted that there's never a wrong time to talk about Bob Marley because the issues he raised were always relevant and might be more important today than ever before.
"So many things are going on in the world, and we as black people have really got to have a perspective and a direction," Tompkins said. "Bob Marley's music and the concepts and the Rasta theology that supports what he does, it really is a help to us in times when we have to figure out what is our next step and where we are going as a people."
Dawes also recalled how the singer wouldn't hesitate to reveal his true emotions in his songwriting. "What is distinctive about Bob Marley is that he represents one of those artists that had the capacity to express his own lyrical sensibility," he explained. "That is the sensibility of his own feeling, of his heart on his sleeve." Dawes also mentioned that when the great producer Lee "Scratch" Perry first started working with Bob, Perry had summarized Bob's music by saying, "This man just talk his heart."
"In a sense, Bob Marley represented a Caribbean artist who offered a model for how a writer can work in the context of a society to write about it, to put the history and the memory of the country and the society in writing," Dawes concluded. "But (it was) also his model as somebody of faith, because I'm somebody of faith. He gave me a mechanism to write about it in a powerful and meaningful way, so he continues to be influential in that way."