Growing up in the Coal Region of Pennsylvania in the 1970s gave me a varied musical education. My parents listened to Top 40 and some Oldies (I know the words to every song from Frankie Vallie and the Four Seasons); my grandparents listened to the Golden Oldies on the radio and on 8-tracks, so The Mills Brothers, The Andrew Sisters and Glen Miller were frequent sounds. There was the community band who played marches, show tunes and orchestra transcriptions at concerts once a week in the summer and a yearly formal concert right before Thanksgiving (my father played trumpet in it and I later played in it on clarinet). Of course, every Saturday night at 7 was "The Pennsylvania Polka Hour" on the local PBS station, which my grandparents insisted on watching. But, around 1980, I was introduced to something completely different.
My parents went to Jamaica on vacation, and left me home with my grandparents. As a bonus, I ended up with the Chicken Pox, so I spent the week learning how to crochet and essentially driving both sets of my grandparents crazy. However, that was not the only memorable part of my parent's vacation.
When they came home, they brought flour sack clothes, necklaces made from coral, including a very memorable phallis shaped one that I tried to wear to school and couldn't understand why I could wear one of the coral necklaces but not the other; cologne, a liqueur made from rum called "Rumona" and reggae music, mostly Bob Marley, in the form of 33rpm records.
Reggae was nothing like I had ever heard before--the repetitive rhythms, the bass line ostinato, the social justice aspect of the lyrics, and the deeply melodic voices, seemed quite exotic to me. "Get Up, Stand Up" played on our console stereo and opened my world. It had never occured to my 7 year old self that people were being oppressed in this "modern" age. "I Shot the Sherriff"'s recurring walking bass line would become an ear worm, and, I would need to listen to it to get it to stop. It sparked conversations where I asked my parents about race, politics, and society which frankly would never have occured. The only person of color in my school was a boy a few years older than me whose grandfather was HALF African-American. Bob Marley and his music presented me with a world view that was so completely different from what I experienced, that I believe it still influences me on a daily basis.
When I think back on my childhood, one of the strongest memories is laying on the floor of the living room in the evening, with the lights low, my father sitting on the couch drinking Rumona over crushed ice, and Bob Marley playing on the stereo. Thanks Bob.
