Good friends we have had,
Oh, good friends we’ve lost
along the way.
In this great future you can’t forget your past.
The Gilberto Gil cover of “No Woman No Cry” has been working its way to the top of my TNN Weekly Weekend Reward queue for several months. This concert performance —which begins with his Portuguese version (“Nao Chore Mais”) before swinging into the English words— explores (at least in my opinion) depths of the song that are missed even in Bob Marley’s Ur rendition.
The words and spirit of “No Woman No Cry” held for me the same kind of adolescent fascination described by Mark Steyn in the last edition of his indispensable “Song of the Week” columns.
Now, alas, the song has been moved into the category of “In Memoriam” with the death by complications from diabetes, in Kingston on 3 January, of the song’s credited writer Vincent Ford; he was sixty-eight.
I remember when we used to sit
In the government yard in Trenchtown
Observing the hypocrites
As they would
mingle with the good people we meet.
Good friends we have had,
Oh, good friends we’ve lost
along the way.
In this great future you can’t forget your past.
So dry your tears, I sayNo, woman, no cry
No, woman, no cry
Little darling, don’t shed no tears
No, woman, no cryI remember when we used to sit
In the government yard in Trenchtown
And then Georgie would make the fire light
As it was log wood burnin’ through the night
Then we would cook corn meal porridge
Of which I’ll share with you
My feet is my only carriage
So I’ve got to push on through
But while I’m gone, I mean…
Everything’s gonna be alrightSo woman, no cry
No, no, woman,
No, woman, no cry
Oh, my little sister, don’t shed no tears
No, woman, no cry
Vincent “Tartar” (knows as “Tarta”) Ford, ran the soup kitchen (optimistically called The Casbah) in “the government yard in Trenchtown” when the young and penniless Bob Marley arrived from Nine Miles. He was taken —as were many— under Mr. Ford’s wing. He was taught how to play the guitar and given food and a place to crash.
There has been considerable debate (and legal dispute) about whether Mr. Ford really wrote the song or whether Mr. Marley gave him the credit both as a tribute and as a way to divert royalties to friends and family after an ugly altercation with his record label.
As Rob Kenner noted in his obituary in The New York Times:
Lost amid the hue and cry over [the question of authorship] was any sense of Mr. Ford himself, who died of complications of diabetes and hypertension, according to Paul Kelly, a spokesman for the Bob Marley Foundation.
Mr. Ford’s own story was dramatic, and was long entwined with Marley’s. He used a wheelchair for decades after losing his legs to diabetes, but according to a Jamaican newspaper, he saved another youth from drowning when he was 14. He was also responsible for saving Marley from starvation as a teenager. The “government yard in Trenchtown” described in “No Woman, No Cry” was No. 3 First Street, where Mr. Ford operated a simple kitchen, known as the Casbah, in one of several communal concrete dwellings built around courtyards in the public housing development there.
All-night rehearsals with the future reggae stars Bunny Wailer and Peter Tosh were routine at the Casbah, where Mr. Marley lived for a time and romanced Rita Anderson before their 1966 wedding. Today it is a museum, the Trenchtown Culture Yard, one of the few attractions that draws tourists into Kingston’s troubled inner city. The wooden table on which Mr. Marley slept and his Volkswagen bus were even visited by Prince Charles.
“Tata [sic] was an unbroken link to a generation, many of whom are now gone,” said Vivien Goldman, author of the groundbreaking Marley study “The Book of Exodus” (Three Rivers Press, 2006). “The last time I saw him he was going into a Marley family gig in Kingston, and he was just borne along on a wave of youth, all admiring him and understanding what he’d come to represent.”