Bob Marley’s Mother, Cedella Booker, Dies at 81
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Cedella Booker, the mother of Jamaican music legend Bob Marley, died Tuesday at her home in Miami. She was 81.
Booker, a Jamaica native, was 18 when she married Norval Marley, a British man 32 years her senior. Their son brought Jamaican reggae music to international prominence with hits like “No Woman No Cry.” Bob Marley died in Miami of a brain tumor in 1981 at age 36.
After Norval Marley died in 1955, Booker married an American man and settled in Delaware. She wrote two biographies of her famous son and recorded two albums, “Awake Zion!” and “Smilin’ Island of Song.”