“Redemption Song” by Bob Marley

Bob Marley wrote "Redemption Song" himself, words and music, and put it at the very end of Uprising, the twelfth album by Bob Marley and the Wailers, produced by Chris Blackwell for Island; it came out in 1980. The Wailers sit this one out. It's Marley alone, singing and strumming an acoustic guitar in G major with nothing behind him, a rare thing from a man who made most of his records with a band.

Some of its most important lines come from the Pan-Africanist orator Marcus Garvey, drawn from his speech "The Work That Has Been Done", and Marley was already reciting that speech in public by July 1979, when he appeared at the Amandla Festival. The bare setting puts all the weight on the words, and it's widely ranked among the greatest things he ever did.

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