![]() ![]() “And specifically ‘No Woman, No Cry.’ Because I don’t think there was one person out there that didn’t feel connected, and that was exactly what we needed - to reconnect.” And now, after a time of unfathomable suffering and loss, and rising consciousness of the lingering history out of which Bob Marley’s songs first arrived, his music gains resonance, almost majestically so.īeachLife co-founder Allen Sanford, who along with his investors took an enormous risk throwing a festival during the uncertainty of an unpredictable and crushingly ongoing pandemic, said that this moment was exactly why making BeachLife happen right now was worth the gamble. Before there were books, much less computers and televisions, songs carried the human experience across time and through generations. “In this great future, you can’t forget your past, so dry your tears, I say…No woman, no cry.”įew present did not feel the pull of tears in this moment. “Good friends we have, good friends we’ve lost, along the way,” sang Stephen Marley, his voice an eerily exact replica of the ragged, world-weary yet resolute soulful timbre his father possessed. But “No Woman, No Cry,” a lamentation buttressed by the soulful chorus of the three Jamaican women taking the roles of Bob Marley’s famed “The I-Threes” (which included Stephen and Ziggy’s mother, Rita Marley) somehow took things to another level. The entire 90-minute set was communal, as thousands of voices joined in song. And so, though this performance came 18 months later than expected, the Marleys seemed to have arrived at just the right time. The songs he sang from the time he first burst on the world stage in the mid-’60s til his death in the early ‘80s are often called (as is the enduring compilation of his work) “Songs of Freedom.” But they are also songs of sorrow and loss and, most crucially, spiritual roadmaps for keeping on in the face of crushing adversity. ![]() that night, a satiated weariness prevailed as Stephen and Ziggy Marley raised their voices to sing their father’s songs.īob Marley, had he not died young, would have been 75 in 2019, when this festival was supposed to have occurred. Singers sang about most everything human beings get up to and get down to, and after a year in which everybody was largely kept apart, just under 10,000 people came together each day and communed as only our species does - by shaking their butts, waving arms in the air, hugging, shuffling, and smiling like sunshine and togetherness were miraculous and newfound things.Īnd so by 9 p.m. They sang of love and sex and drugs and beauty galore, of hellhounds, oceans, and midnight jokers, of the Land Down Under, and the moon bright on a treetop night. By the time the Marleys stepped onto the Hightide stage at BeachLife Festival Sunday night, 51 bands had performed several hundred songs from morning til night over the previous three days. ![]()
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