Bunny Wailer, reggae royalty, dies at 73

Credited with bringing musical style to the masses

Bunny Wailer, a founding member of the Wailers, the Jamaican group he founded with Bob Marley and Peter Tosh, which helped bring reggae music to a worldwide audience, died March 2 in Jamaica. He was 73.

The death was announced by his manager, Maxine Stowe. There were conflicting accounts about whether he died at a hospital in Kingston or in St. Andrew Parish. He had been treated for a stroke suffered last year.

Wailer, a three-time Grammy Award-winner whose original name was Neville Livingston, was the last surviving member of the Wailers, which he helped form in the early 1960s.

He shared a hardscrabble childhood with Marley in rural Jamaica and later in the Kingston neighborhood of Trench Town, where they discovered music and met Tosh, who had taught himself to play a homemade guitar.

Other members came and went, and the group’s name changed from the Teenagers to the Wailing Rudeboys to the Wailing Wailers, but Marley, Tosh and Wailer were the nucleus. In 1963, they recorded “Simmer Down,” a plea to end violence among the “rude boys” in the Kingston slums, which became a No. 1 hit in Jamaica.

Blended styles

At first, the Wailers, as they became known, blended the Jamaican musical styles of rock steady and ska with the rhythmand-blues and jazz they heard on U.S. radio stations.

“American music was a part of Jamaican culture,” Wailer told the San Francisco Chronicle in 1998. “We used to listen to (R&B performers) Rosco Gordon and Louis Jordan. Then we started getting into Louis Armstrong, Louis Prima, Bill Haley, that rock-and-roll. If they were hot in America, they were hot in Jamaica — until we started to make our own music.”

All three principal members of the Wailers wrote songs and alternated singing the lead vocals. Wailer — “I inherited my name from the Wailers. That’s how serious I am about this,” he said in 1986 — had a soulful tenor voice, sometimes reminiscent of Sam Cooke and was known for his high harmonies. He sang the lead part on his compositions “Dreamland” and “Dancing Shoes” and on a cover version of Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone.”

By the late 1960s, the Wailers and other musicians, such as Joe Higgs, Jimmy Cliff and Toots Hibbert of Toots and the Maytals, slowed the rhythm to a distinctive loping pattern, giving birth to reggae. The lyrics often highlighted social struggles and spiritual concerns.

“The music caused a lot of people to change their lives and their convictions,” he told the Chronicle. “It was saying something a little different from ‘Darling, I love you’ and ‘Baby, I need you.’”

The Wailers were outspoken about their Rastafarian faith, which emphasized Black pride and held that Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie was a deity. The smoking of marijuana, or ganja, was a sacred ritual. (Wailer spent 14 months in prison on a marijuana charge in the late 1960s.)

The Wailers’ first few albums were released only in Jamaica before they signed with Island Records, founded by Jamaican entrepreneur Chris Blackwell. The group was renamed “Bob Marley and the Wailers,” and Marley and Tosh wrote most of the songs on the group’s first two albums for Island, “Catch a Fire” and “Burnin’” (both 1973).

Even as his beard and dreadlocks turned white, Wailer was an energetic concert performer, and his exquisite voice never deserted him. He divided his time between Kingston and a farm in Jamaica’s interior.

“I am more a man of the bushes, the jungle, the weeds,” he said in 1990. “That’s where my inspiration comes from. That’s what keeps Bunny Wailer alive. And it’s not good to stray from your life force.”