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Bunny Wailer, One Of The Founders Of Reggae Music, Dies At 73

Jackson Odom Kpakpo

Bunny Wailer, One Of The Founders Of Reggae Music, Dies At 73

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.

Mr. 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 Mr. 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.

By Jackson Odom Kpakpo