The Death and Lasting Legacy of Bob Marley

Bob Marley died on May 11, 1981, at Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in Miami, Florida, four years after doctors first found the cancer that killed him. He was 36 years old. Born Robert Nesta Marley on February 6, 1945, in the rural village of Nine Miles, St. Ann, Jamaica, to Cedella Malcolm and a white overseer named Norval Sinclair Marley, he moved as a boy to Trench Town, one of Kingston’s poorest neighborhoods, where he came of age amid ska and rocksteady sound systems and formed a vocal trio in the early 1960s with Neville “Bunny Wailer” Livingston and Peter Tosh. That trio, the Wailers, became the vehicle through which Marley would carry a Jamaican musical form to a worldwide audience.

The illness that killed him began inconspicuously. In July 1977, following an injury to his right big toe during a soccer match in Paris, doctors discovered a dark lesion under the nail. A biopsy identified it as acral lentiginous melanoma, a rare subtype of skin cancer that occurs on the palms, soles, and nail beds and disproportionately affects people with darker skin, in part because it is not linked to sun exposure and is often diagnosed late. Physicians recommended amputating the toe, but Marley declined more invasive surgery, reportedly citing his Rastafari beliefs about bodily wholeness, and instead had the nail and surrounding tissue removed along with a skin graft. The cancer was not stopped. By 1980 it had spread to his lungs, liver, and brain. He collapsed while jogging in New York’s Central Park that September and continued to decline despite experimental treatment in Bavaria; he died the following spring while flying home to Jamaica, after the plane diverted to Miami.

In the years between his diagnosis and his death, Marley produced the music that defined his career and reggae’s global breakthrough. Catch a Fire (1973) introduced the Wailers to an international rock audience after Marley signed with Chris Blackwell’s Island Records; Exodus (1977), written partly in London following an assassination attempt on Marley in Kingston the previous year, became his commercial and critical peak and was named Time magazine’s Album of the Century in 1999; and Uprising (1980) was his final studio album released in his lifetime. His song “One Love,” from Exodus, was named the BBC’s Song of the Millennium in December 1999. Across his career Marley sold more than 20 million records, making him, by the account of multiple biographers, the first major music star to emerge from what was then called the developing world.

Jamaica awarded Marley its Order of Merit, the nation’s third-highest honor, in 1981, shortly before his death, and gave him an official state funeral that drew mourners across the island. His posthumous influence has, if anything, grown: he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1994, and the 1984 compilation Legend has sold more than 28 million copies worldwide, making it the best-selling reggae album in history. Decades after his death, Marley remains reggae’s most recognized ambassador, and his case is still cited in dermatology literature as a landmark example of melanoma in people with darker skin, a grim medical footnote attached to an otherwise singular musical legacy.