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movement. Bob Marley quoted him in Redemption Song. Burning Spear’s most celebrated album – one of the most celebrated, still, in all reggae – took Marcus Garvey’s name. Jamaica’s north coast and the capital of St Ann Parish, Spear perhaps unsurprisingly sees himself as part of a trinity of local heroes, together with Garvey and Marley. “I-man were born at 12 King Street, off Market Street,” he tells MOJO today, “which was where Marcus Garvey were born, and Bob also was from the same parish, so it’s the three of us as one.” PEAR’S UPBRINGING WAS TOUGH EVEN for rural Jamaica. He was the second youngest of 13 – with four brothers and eight sisters, and religiously strict parents. “My mom was a cook and my father do road construction and my parents was Pentecostal,” he recalls, “so I had to go to church two times for the day – you ain’t chickening out on that!” School meant soccer and swimming and running, but music wasn’t on Rodney’s radar until his teens, as the stars to rival the ascendancy on the airwaves of US R&B. “I started to feel this music from the late ’50s into ➢
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REETING MOJO AT THE PRE-APPOINTED hour, the man born Winston Rodney but known for over 50 years as Burning Spear begins our conversation with a song that is also a kind of benediction. “As far as I can see, everything is all right with me,” he keens in a quavering vibrato, before shifting up an octave to introduce a favourite topic. “Marcus Garvey has been accused many times wrongfulleee, we need his name to clean up and set his record free… free… free…!” At the age of 77, Burning Spear is among the last surviving reggae icons, one whose wide-ranging tenor remains remarkably undiminished. A pioneer of roots reggae – the early-’70s innovation that brought Rastafari, black consciousness and economic injustice to the fore in Jamaican popular music – he is closely associated with the figure of Marcus Garvey, the Jamaican political activist of the 1920s and ’30s. While Garvey remains controversial – his support for black separatism was applauded by those other racial separatists, the Ku Klux Klan – his Afrocentrism resonated throughout the roots reggae
