How the Marley Brothers Keep Their Father’s Legacy Alive
You could feel it from a mile away, the beam of positive energy emanating from Forest Hills Stadium in Queens on this particular Sunday evening in September. Inside the 13,000-capacity tennis stadium, five of reggae legend Bob Marley’s sons — Ziggy, Stephen, Julian, Ky-Mani, and Damian — are channeling their father’s spirit onstage. The Legacy Tour, which features the five Marley brothers performing on tour together for the first time in more than two decades, has the feeling of a religious gathering. Camouflage patterns and rasta colors adorn noticeably giddy attendees of all ages as the iconic musician’s progeny share his music and its timeless message.
“I grew up watching my older brothers Stephen and Ziggy,” Ky-Mani, 48, says over the phone a few days after their stop in New York. “Watching them, I never knew that music would be a part of my life. So to be able now to grow to the point where we’re sharing the stage and sharing records and winning accolades together, there are no words to describe that.”
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The past year has been a major one for the ever-growing Marley family lore. In February, the film Bob Marley: One Love, a dramatization of the elder Marley’s life starring Kingsley Ben-Adir, premiered. Then, that same month, Julian Marley won his first Grammy for Best Reggae Album for Colors of Royal, an album that came about after a chance encounter that Julian had with the producer Antaeus, who ran a studio in the back of a restaurant where he was dining. “We had things happening at the same time,” Julian, 49, says. “The Grammy for the Colors of Royal album, and then the movie came out. Everything is our father’s spirit. This is the time of our father’s spirit, so we have to do what has to be done.”
Ziggy, 55, agrees. “The thing is that it was not some great marketing strategy, or some kind of long term goal,” he says over the phone towards the end of the tour. “We cannot control what the universe is trying to tell us. So the timing, everything, it worked out perfectly.”
The crowd in Queens is in complete rapture during the Marley brothers’ performance. The staff, too. Behind barricades, just in front of the stage, security guards mouth along to the lyrics of “Get Up, Stand Up.” At the end of that song, the brothers take turns singing the hook. For “I Shot the Sheriff,” Julian takes the lead on vocals. Onstage, the Rastafari flag waves as they go through their father’s catalog of hits with an easy, free-flowing chemistry.
Stephen, 52, who handles much of the production for the tour, as well as the brothers’ other various performances, feels that his father’s music always re-emerges when people need it most. “My father’s music has somehow just always been relevant to the time and what’s taken place,” he says. “Especially now with all these wars that we’re facing around the world, and this is the music that speaks of one love, one heart, one aim, and one destiny, so it’s definitely relevant right now. I think it’s something that’s needed right now as well.”
Julian puts it in spiritual terms. “Our father’s music is almost like holy scripture,” he says “People have been reading about Peter, Paul, Luke, John for decades and centuries. Our father’s music, that is how I understand it now. It’s like a holy scripture that is written, and it can’t change because it wasn’t words of his own. It was words of a higher source.”
For this reason, Stephen says the process of putting together a setlist for this tour was easy. “It’s like a Bible to us. It’s very dear to us,” he says. “After all these years, we kind of have a feel for what each one of us likes to sing and the songs that would be good to sing together and just making a show of it. That’s what we do. So it’s not like something new or hard. Putting this together was a collective effort.”
They aren’t just going through the motions, however. Ky-Mani explains how performing this run of shows brought out a deeper connection to their dad’s music. “It’s more personal,” he says. “This is not like a cover band where we’re just doing covers. There’s something about the feeling.”
“Some of these songs are so special that you can’t just learn them in one night,” Julian adds. “You have to make it soak with you for a couple of weeks, a couple of months.”
All of the brothers I speak with agree that the shows were a special moment for them as a family. For Stephen, whose eldest son, Jo Mersa Marley, passed away in 2022 at age 31, the performances felt healing. “It’s amazing seeing what transcends from the stage to the audience with this common purpose: our father,” he says. “We all went through a personal tragedy two years ago. My son passed away. And it has been the music that keeps me going right now and helps me face it day by day. So it is a blessing for me to be surrounded by the people that I love and doing what I love. It’s just very healing to me.”
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