“Exodus” by Bob Marley

Bob Marley wrote "Exodus" as the title track of the 1977 album he cut with the Wailers in London, where he had fled after an assassination attempt in Jamaica in 1976. The name came first: he had already settled on Exodus as the album's title before he wrote the song.

What came out is a long, rolling march, some seven minutes of riff circling back on itself while Marley binds the Bible's tale of Moses taking his people out of Egypt to the Rastafarian dream of deliverance. It's a hymn with its fists up. As a single it reached 14 in Britain, and in America it did something none of his singles had done before, landing real play on black radio and widening an audience that had been mostly white college kids and Caribbean expats.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.