The thought of carrying on someone’s legacy seems like a weighty and perhaps even daunting responsibility. But for Cedella Marley, daughter of legendary Reggae singer Bob Marley, it’s a privilege.
“There’s not a day that I get up and think, ‘Geez, I’m going to have to go do this again?’” Marley tells ESSENCE. “I’m like, ‘Yes! I work for Bob Marley and he’s my dad.’ I feel like that kid on bring your parents to school day. It’s an honor.”
Marley has introduced her father’s message of peace and love to an entirely new generation with her children’s books, including her most recent one titled Is This Love?
The story is about a little girl welcoming her baby sister into the family by vowing to “love and treat [her] right,” just like the lyrics of the senior Marley’s song bearing the same name. This is the fourth book Marley has adapted from one of her father’s classic songs. She says that when she sits down to write, she starts with her father’s music and then creates a concept to appeal to children.
“My goal is to keep the spirit of the song alive but, of course, make young readers dig it,” she says. “I review the lyrics line by line. I make changes to make it fun to read and to sing but still be recognizable and respectful of Daddy’s original work.”
For Is This Love? she reflected on her own experiences of being a big sister and a mother to three sons.
“I can remember when Mommy was pregnant with Ziggy,” she says. “Of course, you’re excited but you don’t know what’s going to happen because you’ve been the baby for so long. But you know you’re going to love.”
During Marley’s own childhood, her siblings played a special role in her life when friends were hard to come by. Growing up in the seventies with Rastafarian parents was not the norm at the time and it wasn’t accepted in Jamaica.
“When we started to go to school, you would get the teasing: ‘Your parents don’t wash them hair,’ ‘Bob and Rita Marley, them is some dirty rastas.’ It was hurtful,” she recalls. “I remember my dad saying to me, ‘You don’t need friends because you have each other.’ That was something he instilled in me at a young age. I wish I had friends growing up, but because of my circumstances, they were very scarce. So, I enjoyed just having my brothers and my sisters. We were each others’ best friends. And I think that’s okay.”
In the author’s note for the book, Marley shares the value of sibling relationships: Wherever your family comes from, however they come to be together, they are there to build you up and to help keep you there. Writing the book and remembering this wisdom struck a chord.
“This was the first children’s book that I’ve done that actually made me feel a little emotional. I was like, ‘What you doing?! Are you crying?!’” Marley asked herself. “I think all of us feel that emotion at some time in our lives, whether as a child or as a grown up. And so, it was just good to be able to interpret that from a child’s perspective.”
With so much going on in the world today, Marley believes her father’s music is needed now more than ever. Amid so much division, she says music is the one thing that can unite us.
It’s particularly true for the youngest of audiences.
“Children have a very funny appeal to my father’s music,” she says. “All over the world, I’ve watched kids become instantly enthralled by the words.”
Marley first noticed this pull with her own children and believed it would translate to other young minds around the world. She was right.
“I feel like these kids nowadays, they’re being born with old souls,” Marley says. “They gravitate toward Daddy and his music and his image too, which is also very, very fulfilling. It’s a testament of his work. It’s timeless. It’s ageless. And then it becomes limitless.”
Is This Love? is available now wherever books are sold.