A former coworker has shared a striking memory from Bob Marley’s early months in New York in 1966 — a period far removed from stages, concerts, and global attention. According to the coworker, Marley worked a factory machine job during that time, spending long hours operating equipment and finishing his shifts exhausted. Yet every night, he still wrote songs — not on notebooks or proper paper, but on whatever he could find, often the thin sandwich wrappers from his packed lunches.
The coworker described the factory as loud, cold in the mornings, and filled with the mechanical rhythm of machines that drowned out nearly every other sound. Workers communicated mostly through gestures and quick shouts. Marley, new to the environment, settled into the routine quietly. He took his place at a stamping machine, wearing gloves that never quite fit and keeping a steady pace while rows of metal components passed by.
“He barely talked during shifts,” the coworker recalled. “But he listened — really listened — like he was hearing something under the noise.”
During breaks, Marley often stepped away from the group. While others chatted, smoked, or played cards, he sat against the far wall of the break room with his lunch. When he finished eating, he smoothed out the wrapper — waxy, translucent paper stained slightly with bread crumbs — and began writing tiny lines of lyrics on the blank sections.
The coworker said Marley wrote fast, as though trying to catch thoughts before they dissolved. Sometimes he hummed under his breath — a faint melody that barely rose above the drone of machinery in the adjacent room. Other times, he tapped rhythms on his knee, echoing patterns he’d heard earlier in the day.
“He made the wrapper flat with his hands, like it was something precious,” the coworker said. “And then he’d cover it with words. Front, back, corners — anywhere he could fit a line.”
By the end of each shift, Marley’s pockets held several folded wrappers filled with cramped handwriting. He guarded them carefully, slipping them between the pages of an old paperback book he kept in his locker. When he left the factory each night, he carried the book under his arm as though it were a tool as important as anything on the production floor.
One night, after the machines had been shut down and the workers were clocking out, Marley stayed behind for a few minutes. The coworker, gathering gear, happened to walk past him. Marley was leaning over a workbench, softly humming a melody while reading one of the sandwich wrappers under the dim emergency light.
“It was like the music was happening whether he wanted it to or not,” the coworker said. “Even after the noise of the day, he still heard something inside.”
The coworker never learned what happened to those makeshift lyric sheets. Some were likely lost, torn, or thrown away by accident. Others, perhaps, made their way into more polished notebooks years later. But for the people who worked alongside him during that brief time, the memory of Marley writing songs on disposable paper remains one of the most powerful reminders of that period — a moment when creativity pushed through exhaustion, routine, and the harshness of factory life.
“He didn’t wait for the right moment,” the coworker said. “He wrote wherever he could. Even on a sandwich wrapper.”