Today marks 35 years since the death of reggae legend Bob Marley. The OBSERVER ONLINE revisits his ties to African-American songwriter Jimmy Norman.

KINGSTON, Jamaica – Living in Harlem, New York in the 1960s, Jimmy Norman had a reputation as a talented songwriter and music producer.

He co-wrote Time Is On My Side (later a hit for the Rolling Stones) and produced some of the earliest songs featuring a hotshot guitarist named Jimi Hendrix.

Norman, who died in 2011 at age 74, met another talented artiste, Bob Marley, at his apartment in the Bronx in early 1968.

Along with Marley’s wife Rita, they participated in a songwriting session that day.

“He wasn’t wearing dreadlocks at the time, he was just a regular cat and he loved rhythm and blues,” Norman recalled in a 2002 interview with the Jamaica Observer. “All he wanted to talk about was music.”

The session was recorded on a ‘small tape machine’ which Norman unknowingly had for years. It was not until 2002 that he stumbled upon it in his Manhattan apartment.

He eventually put it up for sale through the Christie’s Auction House. It went for just over US$26,000.

Three of the songs on the tape (Falling In And Out Of Love, Stay With Me and You Think I Have No Feelings) were written by Norman and his songwriting partner, Al Pyfrom, who was also part of the session 48 years ago.

Marley wrote the other songs including the popular I’m Hurting Inside.

The songs Norman and Marley wrote were for an album Marley was recording for American producer Danny Sims, who introduced him to the Tennessee-born Norman.

Sims and Rhythm And Blues singer Johnny Nash first met Marley while vacationing in Jamaica during the mid-1960s. Nash covered some of his songs.

Norman and Pyfrom songs have appeared on several Marley compilation albums including Chances Are, released in 1981 by the now defunct Cotillon label.

Their compositions are also on The Formative Years Volume 1 (1996) and Volume 11 (1998) and 2001’s Natty Rebel, which were both distributed by Sims’ company, JAD Records.

Norman told the Observer that he wrote as many as 40 songs for Marley but had little to show in terms of royalties.

“Periodically, I get chump change, nothing big. A lotta people have been making money off of it, not me,” he said.

Marley invited Norman to Jamaica in 1968. He accepted and spent seven months in Kingston, writing songs that would eventually be recorded by Peter Tosh, Byron Lee and the Dragonaires and Neville Willoughby.

It would be another 10 years before Norman saw Marley again. By then, Marley was a superstar, playing to packed houses across the world and hailed by pop stars like Stevie Wonder and The Rolling Stones.

“I saw him backstage at the Beacon Theatre (in New York) and he had all these people around him,” Norman related. “He jumped in my arms man, he just wanted to talk about what we used to do.”

Howard Campbell