The Oral History of Bob Marley

H-Music Reviewed Elsewhere: Roger Steffens. So Much Things to Say: The Oral History of Bob Marley.

Discussion published by Lars Fischer on Tuesday, December 4, 2018

Roger Steffens. So Much Things to Say: The Oral History of Bob Marley. New York: W. W. Norton, 2017. 464 pp. $29.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-393-05845-1; $17.95 (paperback), ISBN 978-0-393-35592-5.

Oral historians have debated for years about the true product of oral history—whether it is the recording, the transcript, or the interview itself. But many outside of the discipline think of oral history primarily as a literary genre, published work in which individuals offer observations or reflections about their experiences with a person, event, or institution. People are exposed to individual or group interviews that are edited, excerpted, and combined, or ones that are sometimes linked through an author's additional comments, insights, and reflections. ...

Two recent books labeled oral history, Marc Myers's Anatomy of a Song and Roger Steffens's So Much Things to Say, use oral history within a literary genre to look more closely at popular music. While one book is a critical survey and the other a biography, both books are serious and lively representatives of the oral history form. The interviews in these works broadly help to illuminate the creation and culture of music, which is perhaps the most elusive of the arts to capture and describe adequately using traditional historical research materials.

... So Much Things to Say, Roger Steffens's oral biography of Marley, is massive: more than seventy- five voices and interviews create a detailed, multifaceted picture of the performer. Oral history can be an effective tool for biography, using intimate personal accounts to sculpt a new portrait of a familiar life. Subjects' voices might be absent, but their presence links and informs the interviews—everyone is talking about them. As a result, their story can seem larger than life, almost legendary.

For Marley, who represents so many things to different people, this may be particularly appropriate. Steffens, a reggae historian, archivist, and broadcaster, recreates Marley's life from a variety of sources, but primarily from interviews he conducted over the past four decades with the singer's friends and associates, each a witness to chapters of Marley's career, including some who had not spoken publicly before. Steffens inserts and labels his own voice on each page where appropriate to help propel the narrative, clarifying details and identifying interviewees. ...

Marley faced crossroads at his career peak, and his last years are his most interesting ...

Marley's tragedy is that he achieved vast multicultural popularity after his death—to this day he remains the symbolic face of reggae around the world. It helps that his core oeuvre includes seven near-perfect studio albums, a consistency that few other pop artists have rivaled. Thus he may well be as important a cultural figure as Elvis Presley, and as inextricably linked to a musical style as, say, Picasso is to a visual one.

Establishing such monolithic significance makes Steffens's biography largely uncritical: seldom a discouraging word is heard. ...

Citation: Lars Fischer. Reviewed Elsewhere: Roger Steffens. So Much Things to Say: The Oral History of Bob Marley. . H-Music. 12-04-2018. https://networks.h-net.org/node/113829/discussions/3259343/reviewed-elsewhere-roger-steffens-so-much-things-say-oral-history Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 1 H-Music

The voices absent from both books are the anonymous listeners. Pop shares with oral history a dialogic nature: records (and movies and TV shows) are completed when fans encounter and embrace them. Mass culture's meaning and influence may be as interesting as the work itself. In this context, pop topics can be a valid, useful means by which oral history is utilized and disseminated. Just as a 45 might entice someone to try the album, or a Bob Marley fan might investigate other reggae, so music lovers who enjoy these books might seek out other renditions of oral history.

Bud Kliment. Oral History Review 45, 2 (2018), 360–365.