Don Taylor

Bob Marley's manager through the years that made him a global figure, and one of the few Jamaicans of his generation to run an international touring operation from the inside. Born in Kingston to a mother who was thirteen years old at his birth and worked as a maid, Taylor grew up in poverty and moved into the American soul circuit as a promoter before returning home.

He met Marley in May 1974. Asked to assemble a benefit concert for a sports complex in Trench Town, Taylor proposed Marvin Gaye as the headline act; a local promoter added Bob Marley and the Wailers to the bill, and Taylor took over Marley's management in the same period, as Island was preparing Natty Dread. He ran the operation through the international breakthrough that followed.

On 3 December 1976, when gunmen entered 56 Hope Road two days before the Smile Jamaica concert, Taylor was shot five times and critically wounded. He was flown to Miami for surgery to remove a bullet lodged against his spinal cord, and survived.

The relationship ended badly in 1980. A promoter's account of a fee for a show in Gabon exposed money that had not reached Marley; by the widely repeated account Taylor admitted skimming earnings over a period of years, and Marley beat him in a hotel room there and ended the management. Taylor said afterwards that he had been made to sign away the agreement at gunpoint. "Bad Card", on Uprising that year, is generally read as Marley's answer to him. Taylor published his own account in the memoir Marley and Me, which the Marley circle disputed and which remains the most contested book about the singer. He died in Miami on 1 November 1999, aged 56, days after heart surgery.