Cedella Booker

Sidilla Editha "Cedella" Booker (previously Marley, née Malcolm; 23 July 1926 – 8 April 2008) was a Jamaican singer and author best known for being the mother of reggae musician Bob Marley.

Biography

Booker was born Sidilla Editha Malcolm in Rhoden Hall, Saint Ann Parish, Jamaica, the daughter of Albertha Whilby and Omeriah Malcolm, a farmer, "bush doctor", and one of the most respected residents of Nine Mile. Her paternal grandfather was Robert "Uncle Day" Malcolm, who descended from the Coromantee (or Akan) slaves shipped to Jamaica from the Gold Coast, today known as Ghana, in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. At 18, she married 59-year-old Norval Sinclair Marley, a white Jamaican of English descent. She became pregnant with their son, Robert Nesta (whose middle name "Nesta" means "wise messenger"). After Norval's death in 1957, Booker and her son moved to Trenchtown, a slum neighborhood in Kingston. This was the only place Booker could afford to live at the time, being a young woman moving from the country to the city.

While living in Trenchtown, Booker gave birth to a daughter, Claudette Pearl, with Thaddeus Livingston, the father of Bunny Wailer, who...

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