[6] Marley is also considered a global symbol of Jamaican music and culture and identity and was controversial in his outspoken support for democratic social reforms.

While initially employing louder instrumentation and singing, they began engaging in rhythmic-based song construction in the late 1960s and early 1970s, which coincided with Marley's conversion to Rastafari.

[11] Bob Marley and the Wailers began to gain international attention after signing to Island and touring in support of the albums Catch a Fire and Burnin' (both 1973).

[16] He permanently relocated to London, where he recorded the album Exodus, which incorporated elements of blues, soul, and British rock and had commercial and critical success.

[24] Marley began to play music with Neville Livingston, later known as Bunny Wailer, while at Stepney Primary and Junior High School in Nine Mile, where they were childhood friends.

[42] In 1963, Bob Marley, Bunny Wailer, Peter Tosh, Junior Braithwaite, Beverley Kelso, and Cherry Smith were called the Teenagers.

[43] The Wailers, now regularly recording for Studio One, found themselves working with established Jamaican musicians such as Ernest Ranglin (arranger "It Hurts To Be Alone"),[44] the keyboardist Jackie Mittoo and saxophonist Roland Alphonso.

For the recordings, Kong combined the Wailers with his studio musicians called Beverley's All-Stars, which consisted of bassists Lloyd Parks and Jackie Jackson, drummer Paul Douglas, keyboardists Gladstone Anderson and Winston Wright, and guitarists Rad Bryan, Lynn Taitt, and Hux Brown.

[52] In 1972, Bob Marley signed with CBS Records in London and embarked on a UK tour with soul singer Johnny Nash.

[53] While in London the Wailers asked their road manager Brent Clarke to introduce them to Chris Blackwell, who had licensed some of their Coxsone releases for his Island Records.

Primarily recorded on an eight-track, Catch a Fire marked the first time a reggae band had access to a state-of-the-art studio and were accorded the same care as their rock 'n' roll peers.

Marley travelled to London to supervise Blackwell's overdubbing of the album at Island Studios, which included tempering the mix from the bass-heavy sound of Jamaican music and omitting two tracks.

[55] The Wailers' first album for Island, Catch a Fire, was released worldwide in April 1973, packaged like a rock record with a unique Zippo lighter lift-top.

[57] Clapton was impressed and chose to record a cover version of "I Shot the Sheriff", which became his first US hit since "Layla" two years earlier and reached number 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 on 14 September 1974.

His new backing band included brothers Carlton and Aston "Family Man" Barrett on drums and bass respectively, Junior Marvin and Al Anderson on lead guitar, Tyrone Downie and Earl "Wya" Lindo on keyboards, and Alvin "Seeco" Patterson on percussion.

[60][61] Marley left Jamaica at the end of 1976, and after a month-long "recovery and writing" sojourn at the site of Chris Blackwell's Compass Point Studios in Nassau, Bahamas, arrived in England, where he spent two years in self-imposed exile.

His appearance at the Amandla Festival in Boston in July 1979 showed his strong opposition to South African apartheid, which he already had shown in his song "War" in 1976.

[69] Confrontation, released posthumously in 1983, contained unreleased material recorded during Marley's lifetime, including the hit "Buffalo Soldier" and new mixes of singles previously only available in Jamaica.

[72] However, later in life, he ended up converting to Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity and was baptised by Archbishop Abuna Yesehaq in the presence of his wife Rita Marley and their children, with the name of Berhane Selassie, on 4 November 1980, shortly before his death.

[89] Marley surrounded himself with people from the sport, and in the 1970s, made the Jamaican international footballer Allan "Skill" Cole his tour manager.

[91] Contrary to urban legend, this lesion was not primarily caused by an injury during a football match that year but was instead a symptom of already-existing cancer.

The band completed a major tour of Europe, where it played its biggest concert to 100,000 people at San Siro stadium in Milan, Italy.

[98] On 21 September 1980, Marley collapsed while jogging in Central Park and was taken to the hospital, where it was found that his cancer had spread to his brain, lungs, and liver.

[99] Marley's last concert took place two days later at the Stanley Theater (now The Benedum Center For The Performing Arts) in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

[102] After eight months of the alternative treatment failing to effectively treat his advancing cancer, Marley boarded a plane for his home in Jamaica.

[108] Jamaican Prime Minister Edward Seaga delivered the final funeral eulogy to Marley, saying: His voice was an omnipresent cry in our electronic world.

Gone from the public record is the ghetto kid who dreamed of Che Guevara and the Black Panthers, and pinned their posters up in the Wailers Soul Shack record store; who believed in freedom; and the fighting which it necessitated, and dressed the part on an early album sleeve; whose heroes were James Brown and Muhammad Ali; whose God was Ras Tafari and whose sacrament was marijuana.

Instead, the Bob Marley who surveys his kingdom today is smiling benevolence, a shining sun, a waving palm tree, and a string of hits which tumble out of polite radio like candy from a gumball machine.

[131] In 2011, ex-girlfriend and filmmaker Esther Anderson, along with Gian Godoy, made the documentary Bob Marley: The Making of a Legend, which premiered at the Edinburgh International Film Festival.

[132] In October 2015, Jamaican author Marlon James's novel, A Brief History of Seven Killings, a fictional account of the attempted assassination of Marley, won the 2015 Man Booker Prize at a ceremony in London.