Bob Marley exported Jamaican reggae to the world, and nearly 50 years after his death, he’s still revered all over the globe. People know the music, but they might not know this little story.
In 1976, Marley was in the middle of a fight between two music companies, Cayman Music and Island Records. Marley wanted to get rid of Cayman Music entirely and didn’t want his music to be associated with them (and specifically owner Danny Sims), so he created a complex system of royalty payments that excluded himself.
One who benefited from this was a friend named Vincent “Tata” Ford. He ran a soup kitchen in the Trenchtown area of Kingston known as the Casbah. He then used the money he earned from those pre-1976 Marley recordings to fund the soup kitchen and to continue to feed Jamaica’s poor.
Ford died in 2009, but the money keeps coming in. As far as I know, the Casbah is still operating.
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