KINGSTON, Feb 4 (AFP) - Nearly 24 years after his death from cancer, reggae great Bob Marley remains at the core of Jamaica's soul, his name and music still part of its everyday life.
In his short 36 years, the singer, guitarist and popularizer of the Ethiopia-centric, ganja-infused Rastafarian religion gave his small Caribbean nation a new, global projection.
Now, on the eve of the 60th anniversary of his birth, Bob Marley-reggae tourism has become a big business in Jamaica.
The official Bob Marley Museum was even on the itinerary of Chinese Vice President Zeng Qinghong when he visited Jamaica at the beginning of February.
With the anniversary celebrations this year, increasingly the self-styled rebel and hero of the oppressed is getting official recognition as a favorite son. Jamaican Prime Minister P.J. Patterson announced this week that the anniversary will be celebrated throughout the entire year.
"His legacy is the positive image that Jamaica enjoys as a nation," said Patterson.
For many regular Jamaicans, Marley is a higher spirit and called a prophet.
"I tell you, listen to the man's music. He can't be an ordinary man," said Samuel Isaacs, a dreadlocked taxi driver.
Picking up the local rhythms on the streets of a Kingston ghetto, Marley and his band the Wailers shaped a distinct rock-tinged sound that spread like fire around the world in the 1970s.
The Marley reggae beat was spliced into popular dance songs from the US to Africa and to Asia, where traditional folk and pop tunes in Thailand and the Philippines were rescored to his easily-swaying beat. By the 1990s, his hallmark dreadlocks had moved from counter-culture to Hollywood culture.
But it is in his home of Jamaica where Marley's legacy is greatest.
While his style pulses in the recordings of a new generation of musicians, his handsome face beams out, around the country, from billboards, t-shirts, children's books, bottles of liquor and telephone directories.
Born in the Jamaican mountains on February 6, 1945, his father Norval Sinclair Marley was a white Welshman, while his mother, Cedella Macolm, was a native black Jamaican.
While still young, Marley and his mother moved to the Kingston ghetto of Trench Town, which he later immortalized in his "Trench Town Rock" and "No Woman No Cry", arguably his most famous song.
He picked up the local ska and reggae rhythms on the streets, recording his first tune at the age of 16 in 1961.
Four years later he created a band with Bunny Livingstone and Peter Tosh, who both later became reggae stars in their own right.
But it was the sound The Wailers shaped in their 1973 album "Catch a Fire" that made reggae a global language.
Struggling and broke during a British tour in 1972, the band connected with London-based Island Records, owned by Chris Blackwell, son of another former Jamaica-based British soldier and a member of Jamaica's white colonial elite.
Blackwell put up money for an full album, and helped add in the riffs, the inflections and the rebellious sound of rock that took Marley's sound into full blossom.
When guitar wizard Eric Clapton covered "I Shot the Sheriff", there was no looking back.
Marley produced 16 albums before he died in 1981, and drew hundreds of thousands of fans to his "Peace Concerts" around the world.
He also gained notoriety for his heavy consumption of marijuana, or ganja, as part of his practice of the little-known Rastafarian religion.
Marley's influence went far beyond popular Jamaican culture. His political outspokenness is blamed for the December 1976 assassination attempt that left him with two bullet wounds.
Five months later, he brought together on stage bitter political rivals, then Prime Minister Michael Manley and opposition leader Edward Seaga. The picture of Marley standing between the two politicians, their hands clasped together over his head, is one of the lasting images of Jamaican politics.
The 60th anniversary of his birth has raised prospects the government would finally give in to calls to officially designate Marley a national hero, Jamaica's highest honour. But for most Jamaicans, it is already a fact of life.

02/04/2005 17:40 GMT - AFP