42 Redemption Song

BOB MARLEY 1980

Marley had already recorded a version of this freedom hymn with his band when Island Records president Chris Blackwell suggested he try it as an acoustic-style folk tune. Inspired by a 1937 speech by Black nationalist leader Marcus Garvey, Marley’s biblically powerful lyrics offer up music as an antidote to slavery, both mental and physical. “I would love to do more like that,” Marley said a few months before his death from cancer in 1981, at age 36. As the final track on his final album, 1980’s Uprising, “Redemption Song” stands as his enduring epitaph.