trench town culture yard

I remember when we used to sit
In the government yard in Trenchtown
– No Woman No Cry, Bob Marley & the Wailers

Bob Marley moved to the government-owned Trench Town housing projects in the late 1950s and lived there through his teenage years.

Officially, a man named Vincent Ford, who ran a soup kitchen in Trench Town, wrote No Woman No Cry along with several other Bob Marley songs during this time. It is widely assumed though that Bob Marley did in fact write these songs but listed Ford as the songwriter in order to avoid a contract with Cayman Music and also so that the ongoing royalty checks could support Ford's soup kitchen.

Today Trench Town hosts a museum dedicated to those musicians and notable figures (Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, Bunny Wailer, etc.) who once lived in the neighborhood known as the Hollywood of Jamaica.