Roots of a Revokution

This interesting two-disc collection isn't exactly the "roots" of Bob Marley, since it consists of tracks recorded with producer Lee "Scratch" Perry between August 1970 and April 1971 and Marley had been working in and releasing material from Jamaican studios for some ten years by this time, and it isn't even a Marley anthology, really, because there are dozens of tracks here by the likes of Dave Barker, Johnny Lover, Big Youth, Perry's Upsetters, and Marley's fellow Wailers Bunny Livingston and Peter Tosh.

The story of the Soweto Revolt has in the first instance to tell what happened, and how. And because all revolts have their origin in events, both remote and recent, I am indebted to the many sources from which I was able to borrow books, pamphlets and documents.

This book traces the history of ritual landscapes in the British Isles, and the transition from religious practice to recreation, by focusing on a highly understudied exemplar: the coin-tree. These are trees imbued with magical properties into which coins have been ritually embedded. This is a contemporary custom which can be traced back in the literature to the 1700s, when it was practiced for folk-medical and dedicatory purposes. Today, the custom is widespread, with over 200 coin-trees distributed across the British Isles, but is more akin to the casual deposition of coins in a wishing-well: coins are deposited in the tree in exchange for wishes, good luck, or future fortune. Ceri Houlbrook contributes to the debate on the historic relationships between religion, ritual, and popular magic in British contexts from 1700 to the present.