![]() ![]() Yet I must say that it was Bob who helped me enter the business." "The album was something that had been happening all along, simply a logical progression and not part of Bob's gift to the people. ![]() In the last case, the significance of the album she had been working on before Marley's death was suddenly blown out of proportion. That faith has helped Rita Marley get through the rough times that followed the death of her husband from cancer in May of last year - to overcome her own grief, sort out the affairs of his record company, become a source of strength to her five children, pursue her own career. In the meantime, we all try in our way to be strong." That's my struggle, those are my concerns. When Selassie's motorcade passed by me in 1966, and he waved, and I saw the nail prints in his hands - just like Christ's - I knew my course. "By the time I got the message of Selassie in 1966 when the emperor visited Jamaica, Bob had already been teaching me to eat healthy, dress modestly, preserve my self-respect, recognize my identity and understand my place in Creation. "The people who know about what is really happening on earth now are bringing about a certain awareness and consciousness of when and how certain things are going to happen in the Last Days," she says, referring to the Apocalypse Rastas believe is imminent. Rita Marley, 37, like most Rastas, is a resolute fatalist, cultivating patience until the Final Judgment. "To every thing there is a season," she insists, earnestly quoting Ecclesiastes III:i, while seated in her hotel suite the day after a jammed and critically acclaimed show at the Ritz ballroom in lower Manhattan it was one of the make-up dates for the much-ballyhooed tour she backed out of last spring. But when the exotic burden grows too onerous, well, the Scriptures take a beating. Millions of fans from New York City to Nigeria, from Paris to Portsmouth, expect her to carry on his work. She is heir to the reggae kingdom of Bob Marley, whose hypnotic brand of Jamaican rock propelled by a peculiarly insistant stutterbeat became one of the most popular and galvanizing sounds of the last decade. Rita Marley subscribes to this faith, but for her the act of sitting and waiting becomes more problematic than most. Rastas decline to cut their hair, to eat pork and other "unclean foods," to hold a job within "Babylon," the corrupt world in which they find themselves stranded, pointing for justification to passages in the Coptic and King James Bibles. Rastas (modern-day equivalents of the messianic Caribbean "cargo cults" of slavery days, who saw deliverance in the mainsail of any ship popping up on the horizon) have resolved to simply sit and wait, taking no part in the Creole society that still favors a fair-skinned black over a dark-skinned one. RITA MARLEY, widow of reggae superstar Bob Marley, and herself a singer lately being referred to as the "new queen of reggae," is a Bible thumper of the old school.
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