Black Pearl Livingston ADD
On the opening track to Claudette “Black Pearl” Livingston’s debut album, veteran Trench Town singer Mikey Knowledge announces Pearl’s royal reggae lineage: “From Bunny Wailer’s father and Bob Marley’s mother, here comes now Black Pearl”. With two of the three founding members of The Wailers as her brothers, it was inevitable that Pearl would also become a singer/songwriter/musician. Pearl has her older brothers’ indomitable accomplishments in mind on her debut album Your Richness Is Life (Fifty Fifty Records) as she announces on the track, “I’m The Rebel”: “My brothers conquered the world with reggae music, not because I’m a girl, I know I will do it/Wailers conquered the world with reggae music, I am Pearl, and I will do it.”
Born Claudette “Pearl” Livingston on June 7, 1962, Pearl spent the first two and a half years of her life in Trench Town. The economically deprived yet musically fertile west Kingston community that birthed The Wailers was also home to numerous iconic Jamaican singers including Alton Ellis, Toots and the Maytals, Delroy Wilson, and the man who taught Bob, Bunny and Peter Tosh how to harmonize, Joe Higgs.
Pearl was raised by her mother, Cedella, who passed away in 2008, and was a teenager before she really got to know her father, Thaddeus Livingston. When Pearl was two and half years old, she migrated with her mother to Delaware. Cedella married Mr. Edward Booker, an American civil servant, and had two sons with him, Richard and Anthony. The family moved to Miami when Pearl was in her mid-teens. In 1990, Anthony, only 19 years old, was killed by Miami police in a shopping mall. Pearl says his death, just nine years after her brother Bob’s passing, “shook her world”.
Multiple sources identify Bob Marley's birth name as Nesta Robert Marley. However, when it was suggested to Cedella that Nesta sounded like a girl’s name, she switched his first and middle names, registering Robert Nesta Marley on his birth certificate. Yet, members of Marley’s family, including Pearl, who was 17 years his junior, called him Nesta. Pearl fondly reminisced about the times she spent with him in Delaware. “When Nesta came to visit, he would say, ‘where’s Pearl?’ Sometimes I would be in the park playing and when the park closed off, he’d come and make sure I’m alright. He was like my daddy, too, and when he had the time, he would sit down, strum his guitar, sing songs, and I’d listen to his lyrics. His “Natty Dread” was one of the songs where he would tell me, ‘don’t sing when mi a sing, sing when mi tell you fi sing’,” laughs Pearl, her voice effortlessly shifting from an American accent to a Jamaican lilt. “I really admired Nesta. My niece Cedella (daughter of Bob and Rita Marley) says ‘auntie, you are dad’s biggest fan, there are fans, but you’re an air conditioner.’”
It was Nesta who made arrangements to move his mother and her children to Miami because he thought Delaware was too cold for them. Pearl attended school in Miami and unfortunately, she got involved with drugs there. “I got caught up in that cycle for over 20 years, and some days it wasn’t a good vibe. I had to go through recovery, and I thank God that I’ve put that 2 behind me,” explained Pearl, who has lived in St. Ann Parish, Jamaica (where Bob and his mother Cedella were born) for the past eight years, a move that has bolstered her healing. “I really embrace the beauty of the island, I have my moringa (a versatile plant with medicinal benefits), and aloe vera to purify my blood. My bredren who is an herbalist advises which herbs to use. It’s one day at a time, but I can say I am eight years completely clean, because when I left the states, I said, I am not turning back,” Pearl continued. “I feel like the prodigal child that has returned. I am a testament that God is good, Rastafari is good.”
Music has consistently been a part of Pearl’s journey. Throughout her struggles, she continued to sing, write songs and play piano and keyboards. Her mother took her to meet Chris Blackwell who expressed an interest in recording her but that never materialized. In the late 1980s she was also a part of a Trench Town based group called Knowledge. “Then I got to a point and I thought, it’s time for me to sing my music, the songs that I have written,” Pearl stated.
While visiting Trench Town, Pearl met Greg Quail, an award-winning Australian television producer and a lover of Jamaican music. Greg was moved by Pearl’s story and when he listened to the songs she had written, he decided to facilitate an opportunity for Pearl to record. He got in touch with some of the members of Knowledge, including Mikey Smith, a.k.a. Mikey Knowledge and the celebrated Trench Town songwriter Ziggy Soul, and recruited an ensemble of some of Jamaica’s greatest musicians including legendary guitarist Earl “Chinna” Smith, Lyndon “Ace” Webb (bass), Franklyn “Bubbler” Waul (keyboards), Junior “Bird” Baillie (drums), Eric “Twin Rock” Samuels (drums), Raymar “G Sharp” Rochester (guitar) and the remarkably talented singer and vocal arranger Isha Bel. They went into Kingston’s Anchor Recording Studio, the musicians built their nuanced, exquisitely textured reggae rhythms and brought Pearl’s songs to life.
Now, at age 63, Black Pearl will release her debut album Your Richness Is Life, produced by Greg Quail, a collection of 10 stunning reggae tracks rooted in reality, romance, and Rastafari. Your Richness Is Life opens with the title track, released on July 4, a vibrant, upbeat song that reveals Pearl’s inspirations in making music: “From the belly of my mother, I hear the voice of my brother, he’s singing his songs to me”; Pearl sums up her brother’s words of encouragement in the repeated lyric, “don’t let life get you down”.
Offering advice to “Children Inna Dis Ya Time”, Pearl reinforces a proven strategy, “working for a greater time, you’ve got to work, hard”; Pearl first recorded the song many years ago, but the master tape was lost in a fire at a friend’s home in Trench Town. Just as Nesta immortalized the west Kingston community on classics such as “Trench Town Rock”, Pearl powerfully salutes the district’s next generation of revolutionaries on “Youths From Trench Town”: “they make the music and create the sound…they love to kick barriers down…they are the youths from underground.” Uniting singers across generations, the track features a cameo shout-out from Mikey Knowledge and an extended free-style rap from emerging Trench Town artist J. Written. “I Can Tell” is a love song Pearl wrote years ago and she delivers with an impressive, spirited soulfulness. “Knocking at your Door”, written with the late Trench Town artist Ziggy Soul, is the 3 story of a former partner who’s “not interested anymore”; Pearl expresses her anguish with heartfelt conviction, underscored by a forceful reggae beat, anchored in a rumbling bassline.
“Unify The Love”, as the title suggests, is a plea to come together, as Pearl’s vocals soar over a joyous soundscape that weaves a bubbling organ pattern and blasts of horns into a soul-shaking drum and bass. “We are all connected, we have to live good, that is where the saying ‘one love’ comes in,” Pearl explains, “so unify the love.”
In tribute to her older brothers, Pearl sings two of their masterworks: Nesta’s “Natty Dread”, the title track to his celebrated 1974 album, which takes the listener on an outing through the streets of Trench Town, as observed by a natty dread Rastafarian, and “Rock ‘N’ Groove”, the glorious title track to Bunny Wailer’s 1981 album, originally recorded with the mighty Roots Radics band, where dancehall swag meets a majestic reggae groove. “I love my brothers unconditionally, and I was shown love by both of them,” Pearl shares. “I spent almost a month with him (Bunny, born Neville O’Riley Livingston) in my father’s original house in Washington Gardens in Kingston before he passed (March 2, 2021). He was so eloquent, he had some ways about him, but he always showed me kindness.”
Regarding her brother Nesta’s passing on May 11, 1981, Pearl reflected, “I was just about to turn 18 and that blew my mind. He died so early, being just 36 years old, but he saw everything ahead of time. In the house one day he said, ‘mi soon lef from here, so live good amongst each other, don’t argue and fight’. Not long after that, he went to New York City, where he collapsed (in Central Park on September 21, 1980) and passed away a few months later. I’m grateful I was shown love by all sides of my family,” adds Pearl. “I get big love from all my nieces and nephews even though sometimes there’s the physical distance and I’m very proud of all of them.”
Your Richness Is Life closes with “There’s A Storm Out There”, written by Pearl and Ziggy Soul, a reggae rallying cry rooted in steadying Nyabinghi drumming with jazzy saxophone embellishments. However, the song’s notification of an impending storm has nothing to do with the weather: it’s a warning to pay attention to the sufferers’ increasing resentment towards repeated injustices because it’s connected to ongoing violence, as Pearl wails: “So many times we try, so many youths still die, ‘oh why, oh why, oh why, oh why,’ they cry…the time will come when the people will strike, marching like an army, don’t take it too lightly because, rising like a tsunami.”
“I am like a storm, too, baby, I’m ‘coming in from the cold’,” declares Pearl who has survived personal battles and overcome several obstacles throughout the years but has now fulfilled her dream of recording her debut album. “It feels euphoric,” she enthuses. “Everything has a season, a time, and I thank God for putting this angel of opportunity in my path, and giving me this longevity, the time to be here to do what I have to do and to share my music with the world.”
Written by Pat Meschino
