Legends of Entertainment (ST)

The song is reported to have been written around 1979, appearing for the first time on a demo tape called “Dada Demos” which, amongst other unreleased tracks and re-recordings of older songs, features also an early drum machine version of Could You Be Loved?. German journalist Teja Schwaner claims to have witnessed Marley playing Redemption Song during a hotel stay in Hamburg on tour in 1976,^[5] although he could have confused it with another song.

A few years earlier, Bob Marley had been diagnosed with the cancer in his toe that took his life in 1981. According to Rita Marley, “…he was already secretly in a lot of pain and dealt with his own mortality, a feature that is clearly apparent in the album, particularly in this song.”

After its recording for the Uprising album, the song saw its first public performance during the opener show of the Uprising Tour on May 30, 1980, in Zürich, Switzerland, and continued to be featured in every known setlist of that tour’s further concerts. There exist at least two music video recordings of the song, one produced by the Jamaica Broadcasting Corporation, featuring Marley and his keyboarder Earl Lindo both accompanying themselves on guitars, and a second one from September 1980 featuring Marley during a rehearsal break and his band members listening. A few more recordings from live concerts exist, both audio and video, amongst them a performance from Dortmund, Germany, on June 13, 1980, which is featured on the official 2014 release Uprising Live. In 2004, Rolling Stone placed the song at number 66 among “The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time“. In 2010, the New Statesman listed it as one of the Top 20 Political Songs.^[6]

Bob Marley – vocals, acoustic guitar, production – With Bob accompanying himself on guitar, “Redemption Song” was unlike anything he had ever recorded: an acoustic ballad, without any hint of reggae rhythm. In message and sound it recalled Bob Dylan. Biographer Timothy White called it an ‘acoustic spiritual’ and another biographer, Stephen Davis, pointed out the song was a ‘total departure’, a deeply personal verse sung to the bright-sounding acoustic strumming of Bob’s Ovation Adamas guitar.— James Henke, author of Marley Legend^[8]In 2009, Jamaican poet and broadcaster Mutabaruka chose “Redemption Song” as the most influential recording in Jamaican music history.^[12]

In 2017, “Redemption Song” was featured in series 25 of BBC Radio 4‘s Soul Music, a documentary series exploring famous pieces of music and their emotional appeal, with contributors including Marley’s art director Neville Garrick, Jamaican Poet Laureate Lorna Goodison, Grammy Award-winning artist John Legend, and Wailers guitarist Don Kinsey.^[13In American Songwriter‘s 2019 appreciation of the song, Jim Beviglia analyzed the song as being a “departure” from his regular music. Marley was too much a force of nature to lose his personality just because he was in a new setting. The rhythmic ingenuity that marked his career can be heard in the little instrumental breakdown between verses. His vocal also drips with idiosyncratic power, from the way he hiccups his way through some of the lines to give them some extra flavor to his brilliant phrasing of the word “triumphantly.” Other songwriters might have crammed in a few other words just to fit the meter a bit more snugly, but Marley’s choice gives that word added meaning.^[14]