BURNING SPEAR is the last liuing legend of roots reggae. Emerging from the pouerty of northern Jamaica a font of spirituality and Rfrocentric idealism, it took a mystical seaside epiphany and a chance meeting with Bob Harley for his path in music to be reuealed. "I don’t euen know where the lyrics came from," he tells DAVID KATZ. "But the lyrics did come.”

Portrait: ADRIAM BOOT

GREETING MOJO AT THE PRE-APPOINTED hour, the man born Winston Rodney but known for over 50 years as Burning Spear begins our conversation with a song that is also a kind of benediction.

“As far as I can see, ever ything is all right with me,” he keens in a quavering vibrato, before shifting up an octave to introduce a favourite topic.

“Marcus Garvey has been accused many times wrongfulleee, we need his name to clean up and set his record free… free… free…!”

At the age of 77, Burning Spear is among the last sur viving reggae icons, one whose wide-ranging tenor remains remarkably undiminished. A pioneer of roots reggae – the early-’70s innovation that brought Rastafari, black consciousness and economic injustice to the fore in Jamaican popular music – he is closely associated with the figure of Marcus Gar vey, the Jamaican political activist of the 1920s and ’30s. While Gar vey remains controversial – his support for black separatism was applauded by those other racial separatists, the Ku Klux Klan – his Afrocentrism resonated throughout the roots reggae movement. Bob Marley quoted him in Redemption Song.

Burning Spear’s most celebrated album – one of the most celebrated, still, in all reggae – took Marcus Gar vey’s name.

Born in 1945 in St Ann’s Bay, a sizeable fishing port on Jamaica’s north coast and the capital of St Ann Parish, Spear perhaps unsurprisingly sees himself as part of a trinity of local heroes, together with Gar vey and Marley.

“I-man were born at 12 King Street, off Market Street,” he tells MOJO today, “which was where Marcus Gar vey were born, and Bob also was from the same parish, so it’s the three of us as one.”

SPEAR’S UPBRINGING WAS TOUGH EVEN for rural Jamaica. He was the second youngest of 13 – with four brothers and eight sisters, and religiously strict parents. “My mom was a cook and my father do road constr uction and my parents was Pentecostal,” he recalls, “so I had to go to church two times for the day – you ain’t chickening out on that!”

School meant soccer and swimming and r unning, but music wasn’t on Rodney’s radar until his teens, as the fledgling Jamaican music industr y started producing local stars to rival the ascendancy on the air waves of US R&B.

“I started to feel this music from the late ’50s into the early ’60s,” he says, “and this music’s coming from a distance, ’cos it was mento, ska, rocksteady, all those changes the music came through, and it’s the same music that turn itself into reggae. Jamaica had so much musicians, like there was the great trombone player, Don Drummond, the guitarist Ernest Ranglin, and there was some great people out there who were singing, like The Heptones, Larry Marshall, Peter Tosh, Alton Ellis. All those brethren were there before I-man, so I was listening to the real hardcore, I wasn’t listening to the fancy side of reggae music. And one of my main people who I was listening to is Bob Marley – Iwould listen to ever y one of Bob’s songs.”