Bob marley papers12/13/2023 ![]() The prevailing belief is that he intended to earn a good chunk of money to start his own label (Tuff Gong) back in Jamaica. There’s always been heavy conjecture regarding his purpose in moving to Delaware. There’s so much fascination with that period, as there should be. Like much of Marley’s short life, his time in Delaware was put under the microscope many times in dozens of articles, blogs, local news segments and even a BBC Radio 4 documentary (“Bob Marley: The Chrysler Year” - again, more later). She had moved there a few years earlier and pleaded for her son to join her. He was living with his mother, Cedella, and her second husband, by many accounts a kindhearted gentleman named Edward Booker, in Wilmington, Delaware. At the time of the DOJ interview, he was 21 and just another immigrant from the Caribbean on the brink of deportation. This was four years after Marley made his first recordings in Kingston, Jamaica, but long before he and the Wailers gained any international fame, which came with the release of “Catch A Fire” in 1973. It’s possibly the earliest recorded interview (though it’s more of an interrogation) with Bob Marley. But the document that stopped me in my tracks was a transcript of an interview between Bob and an official at the Department of Justice Immigration and Naturalization Services in Philadelphia on August 17, 1966. Selective Service, passport photos, letters from his mother’s employers, deportation papers, marriage certificates, letter from his doctor, steno notes. Pulled through a Freedom of Information Act request made in 1981 (we’ll get to that later) the file contains so many fascinating official documents - his Jamaican passport, visa applications, letters from the U.S. government kept on Bob Marley that I’m not sure anyone else still alive has seen. For a few months now, I’ve been sitting on a long-lost file the U.S. ![]()
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