The bullet holes are still in the wall at 56 Hope Road, behind glass, in the room where seven gunmen came for Bob Marley on 3 December 1976. This is not a themed attraction. It is the house, and the tour is guided only, on a fixed route, with no photography inside.
History
Before Marley: the Lindos and Island House
The Jamaica National Heritage Trust describes a two storey building, masonry below and timber above, with broad mouldings, handmade stair handrails, lattice work and sash windows, and servants' quarters behind the main residence. Those servants' quarters matter: this was built as a colonial great house in miniature, in the uptown stretch of St Andrew where Jamaica's business class has always lived.
The land came into the Lindo family, one of the island's wealthiest merchant dynasties, through Cecil Lindo, a great uncle of Blanche Lindo, whose son Chris Blackwell founded Island Records. In the 1960s Blackwell made it Island's Jamaican headquarters and a guest house for visiting artists, and it took the name Island House.
How Marley got it
Blackwell gave Marley the run of the place first as a rehearsal space, then as a home. Sources disagree on when ownership changed hands. Google Arts and Culture, working with the Marley estate, puts it at 1974, during the contract renegotiation around Natty Dread. Other accounts say 1975. Either way, a Trench Town man now owned a great house a short walk from the Prime Minister's official residence, and the Kingston press wanted to know how he felt about it. His answer, quoted ever since: "Me bring the ghetto uptown."
He meant it literally. The front yard filled with football most days the band was home, with dominoes in the side yard with Trench Town youths and songwriting in the back. Tuff Gong, the label the Wailers started in Trench Town in 1970 to get out from under exploitative producers, moved to Hope Road, and Marley completed a recording studio on the property in 1979.
3 December 1976
Jamaica in 1976 was close to civil war. Michael Manley's PNP government and Edward Seaga's JLP opposition were running armed constituency gangs, and both wanted Marley's endorsement. He gave neither, but a free concert called Smile Jamaica had been announced under government patronage, and when the government then called a general election for 15 December, the concert started to look like a rally.
At around half past eight on the evening of 3 December, two days before the show, seven armed men came through the gates while the band was on a rehearsal break. Rita Marley was shot in the head in her car in the driveway. Bob was shot in the chest and arm. His manager Don Taylor took bullets in the legs and torso, and a band employee, Louis Griffiths, was shot in the torso. All of them lived. Nobody has ever been convicted. The gunmen were widely reported to have been led by Lester Lloyd Coke, known as Jim Brown, later head of the Shower Posse, who burned to death in a Kingston cell in February 1992 while awaiting extradition.
Marley played Smile Jamaica anyway, two nights later at National Heroes Park, before a crowd usually put at around 80,000. He then left Jamaica and did not live in the country again for well over a year.
The museum
Marley died in Miami on 11 May 1981, aged 36. Rita Marley converted the house into a museum, and it opened on 11 May 1986, five years to the day. Their daughter Sharon was its first curator. In 2001 the site was declared a protected national heritage site.
What it costs and when it opens
Open Monday to Saturday, roughly 9.30am to 4pm, closed Sundays. Tours run about 75 minutes. Adult admission for overseas visitors is usually quoted at around US$25, with published figures ranging from about US$20 to US$30 depending on where you buy, and children under 12 about half. Jamaican residents pay a fraction of that on production of ID.
The "Making of the Music" studio tour is not at Hope Road. That is at Tuff Gong International on Marcus Garvey Drive, a working studio downtown, roughly 20 minutes away. A combination ticket for both on the same day saves a few dollars.
What it is actually like
You cannot wander. Everyone goes round in a group of ten to twenty five with a guide, on a set route, and inside the house you put the phone away.
The guides sing, and the delivery leans warm and performative rather than academic. Ask direct questions and the good ones will give you dates. The bedroom is small and plain. The star shaped guitar is upstairs. The room with the bullet holes is the one people go quiet in.
How it fits a day
Hope Road is a spine. The museum sits on it, Devon House is five minutes south, Hope Botanical Gardens ten minutes north. YaadBinge runs the museum first, at 9.30am or 10am, before the coaches land, then moves along the same road rather than crossing Kingston twice. Allow two hours door to door, which puts you at Devon House by around noon for lunch and ice cream.
