In the near thirty years since the death of the world's greatest reggae-music icon, music lovers, truth seekers and new generation social-activists alike, have flocked to the musical catalog of Bob Marley like new believers on a pilgrimage for soul inspiration. Though Marley's iconic life was cut short before his time, his legacy lives on as vibrantly as it did when he walked among us. This is not only true because of his timeless music, but because of the musical genius of the extraordinary children he left behind.
KyMani Marley, world-renown recording and performing artist (and tenth child of Marley) has not only written and performed songs of redemption around the world like his famous father, but has lived and survived to tell us his own personally redemptive story in the face of abandonment.
Marley's new memoir entitled...Dear Dad: The Marley Son Who Persevered From The Streets To Prominence, is a compelling biographical exegesis of a son who was locked out of his iconic Father's shelter for the first half of his life and forced to survive the poverty and street-predators of Miami's violent ghetto. Estranged from his siblings and cut out of any financial benefit by Marley's widow and manager of the Marley Estate, this compellingly told narrative chronicles Young KyMani's gritty ascent from a bullet-riddled life to the world-stages he now commands as a grammy-nominated musical artist.
It would be easy to think that Ky-Mani Marley, the tenth son of legendary reggae musician Bob Marley, had his Grammy-nominated music career handed to him. But to hear him tell it in DEAR DAD, things weren't so simple in the Marley clan. On the day of Marley's death from cancer, Ky-Mani claims Rita Marley, Bob's widow, vowed that "all of Bob's...****** children will suffer." Ky-Mani talks about the strangeness of occasionally living in luxury at the Marley estate and then going home to poverty with his mother. Eventually winding up on the streets of Miami dealing crack, Ky-Mani had to claw his way up and discover his musical talents on his own. Despite the bitter details of his personal life, Ky-Mani's book celebrates the beauty and love of family and the legacy his father left behind. DEAR DAD is an insightful, often scandalous, look at life inside one of music's largest and wealthiest dynasties.
- Genre: Music, Biography + Autobiography
- Subgenre: History + Criticism, Genres + Styles / Reggae, Genres + Styles / International, Rich + Famous, Personal Memoirs
- Publisher: Farrah Gray Foundation Pr
- Pages: 244
- Language: English
- Format: paperback
- Release Date: January 18, 2010
- Date Published: February 1, 2010
- Author: Ky-Mani Marley