It’s tempting to call Johnny Was his answer to Mayfield’s Freddie’s Dead: an empathic examination of an accidental death (“from a stray bullet”) that nevertheless has wider implications, the lushness of the harmonies at odds with the lyrics. Smile Jamaica was the theme song for the Kingston concert that almost got Marley killed – he was shot by gunmen two days before the gig. It’s tempting to suggest the track itself is oddly prescient: despite the title, there’s something brooding and overcast about its sound, as if Marley didn’t quite have faith in the sentiment the lyrics were supposed to be espousing.
Recorded at the first Wailers session following Marley’s return to Jamaica from his mid-60s sojourn in America, Freedom Time is audibly influenced by the music he heard in the US – there’s a distinct hint of the Impressions’ civil rights anthem People Get Ready about the lyric – and a total delight: piano-led rocksteady with a beautiful descending melody. War (1976)Īs stark and potent as late 70s Marley got, War dispenses with standard verse-chorus structure and any semblance of lyrical poetry. The music exists as an austere backdrop for words taken from a Haile Selassie speech: “Until the philosophy which holds one race superior and another inferior is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned, everywhere is war.” 19.
Marley recorded several versions of One Love – it began life as a ska track in 1965 – but the version on Exodus, interpolated with People Get Ready, is definitive.
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