The 55th Grammy Awards, held on 10 February 2013 at the Staples Center in Los Angeles, put reggae on the main stage twice over: a televised tribute to Bob Marley, and a Best Reggae Album category that included Toots Hibbert and Toots & The Maytals for Reggae Got Soul: Unplugged on Strawberry Hill, per the Recording Academy.
The Marley tribute
Bruno Mars opened with “Locked Out of Heaven” before Sting joined for the Police’s “Walking on the Moon,” Rolling Stone reported. Mars told the audience, “None of this would be possible without Bob Marley,” then yielded the stage to Rihanna, Ziggy Marley and Damian Marley for a group performance of “Could You Be Loved.” ABC News called it one of the evening’s highlights — pop, rock and reggae royalty converging on a single Marley standard.
Toots in the field
When the Best Reggae Album envelope opened, Jimmy Cliff won for Rebirth, beating Toots & the Maytals, Sean Paul, Sly & Robbie & The Jam Masters and The Original Wailers, the Diffuser recap notes. It was Hibbert’s sixth Grammy nomination — the Academy’s artist page lists Reggae Got Soul: Unplugged on Strawberry Hill among seven career nods. The unplugged set, recorded at Strawberry Hill in Jamaica, revisited the title album from 1975 with an acoustic intimacy that matched the elder-statesman status he carried into every festival tent.
Why it matters
Reggae’s two great export voices shared a Grammy night: Marley honoured on television, Hibbert nominated in the same room. Three months later, at the Dominion Riverrock festival in Richmond, Virginia, a bottle thrown from the crowd would hospitalise Hibbert — an incident the archive reported in May 2013 — but on this February evening the story was survival, recognition and a music Jamaica had already been playing for fifty years.
Listen and dig deeper
- Browse Toots Hibbert and Toots & The Maytals in the JamaicansMusic library.
- Previously: ‘True Love’ wins the Grammy (2004). Next: ‘Got to Be Tough’ (2020).
Sources: Recording Academy — Best Reggae Album, 55th Annual Grammy Awards (2013); Recording Academy — Frederick “Toots” Hibbert artist page; Rolling Stone — “Rihanna, Bruno Mars, Sting Pay Tribute to Bob Marley at Grammys” (Dan Hyman, Feb 11, 2013); ABC News — Grammy Marley tribute recap (Feb 11, 2013); Diffuser — “2013 Grammys: Jimmy Cliff Wins Best Reggae Album”.
Editor’s note: This entry is part of the JamaicansMusic online museum — a career timeline assembled from the archive. It is dated to the events it documents; every claim is drawn from the linked sources.