Quoting Garvey - Marleys simplify National Hero's famous sayings in song:

Mel Cooke, Gleaner Writer

Friday, August 17, marked the 125th birthday of Marcus Garvey, the man from St Ann's Bay who remains the person to have led the largest formal organisation of persons of African descent ever, the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA).

As Garvey insisted on the value of the arts in building character, self-esteem and self-knowledge, and was himself a poet (one of the more well-known examples of his work is the admonition to 'Keep Cool'), it is fitting that many an artiste have drawn on his writing and his name.

The most notable, of course, has been Winston 'Burning Spear' Rodney, whose 1975 album Marcus Garvey (produced by Lawrence 'Jack Ruby' Lindo) remains a popular music standard. Marcus Garvey and Ol Marcus Garvey most explicitly called Garvey's name on the 10-track set and the dub version Garvey's Ghost, needed few words as it crackled with the energy of the music.

While Marcus Garvey (the album) is a sophisticated musical reading of Garvey's philosophy (most explicitly contained in the book Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey), there are numerous, simpler references. Among those are deejay Capleton's 1990s chant "Selassie I liveth every time/Emmanuel liveth every time/Marcus Garvey liveth every time". In 1993/1994 Capleton did Trinity, in which he stated "if you dis Marcus, then you must bite the dust/equal rights and justice is what he taught us".

Then there is Tarrus Riley's assertion of lineage in Shaka Zulu Pickney that "just like Martin and Malcolm and Marcus I'm fiery", after the song starts with the salutation to "Marcus Garvey family".

Peter Tosh, once beaten nearly to death by the police in Half-Way Tree and bestowed with a posthumous Order of Merit (OM) this year, closes Moses (The Prophet) with an assurance of Marcus Garvey's immortality, asking "remember Marcus/the Mosiah Garvey?/him no dead/that man no dead/that man no dead/the man a trod earth still/that man a trod earth still/that man a trod earth still/watching his prophecy fulfil".

Among their extensive Garvey references The Marleys, as in father Robert in Redemption Song and his children in Tomorrow People have put a pair of Garvey quotes into song. Rather, they have put a 'pare' of Garvey quotes into song, compressing the hero's words into shorter versions.

Bob did it with his acoustic 1980 Redemption Song, starting the second verse with "Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery/None but ourselves can free our minds". This makes a call to action of what Garvey actually said, in 1937, as a definite course of action:

"We are going to emancipate ourselves from mental slavery because whilst others might free the body, none but ourselves can free the mind. Mind is your only ruler, sovereign. The man who is not able to develop and use his mind is bound to be the slave of the other man who uses his mind."

Within 20 years of Bob Marley's death, Ziggy Marley and the Melody Makers released Tomorrow People on their Conscious Party album, the song closing with "you don't know your past, you don't know your future". It is a popular compression and extension of Garvey's exhortation that African people should study their history, as "a people without the knowledge of their past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots".

And in his performance at the Santa Barbara County Bowl, United States, in 1979, Marley in Africa Unite Bob Marley adju-sted the second verse to explicitly reference Garvey, singing "Marcus Garvey said it/so let it be done/I know you know who you are/under the sun".