#21, “Redemption Song,” Bob Marley (1980)

150 Favorite Songs: #21, “Redemption Song,” Bob Marley (1980)

I know. I know.

Bob Marley means different things to different people, but if you’re someone like me—that is, a white guy for whom he was only ever a poster on the wall, a greatest-hits compilation, a thing playing in the background while your friends are getting high in the basement—what he means is amorphous and uncool and more than a little bit appropriative. The revolutionary politics are gone, the feel-good singalongs are all you hear, and you’ve heard them all in a dorm room. If you didn’t grow out of it by the time you were old enough to get into a bar, then more the pity for you.

I speed-ran that reaction to Marley in my teen years, but then at the exact time that most people like me were getting exhausted by Bob Marley, Tourist Attraction, I heard Joe Strummer and Johnny Cash sing “Redemption Song.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZBaklS79Wc

Their recording of the song is very pretty. Johnny Cash sounds a bit silly singing it, his deep southern voice singing the Rastafarian “I,” but he’s also very sincere in it—no one’s voice breaks the way Johnny Cash’s does when he sings a line like all i ever had / redemption songs. Strummer, meanwhile, who wanted to be singing reggae even when he was playing punk rock, takes the song on naturally; for the third verse, they alternate lines in a way I find very charming. The whole thing is lovely, with Tom Morello playing a counter-melody on an acoustic guitar throughout. And it made me realize that a lot of the way I felt about Bob Marley was imposed as a reaction to the way other people seemed to feel about him, rather than something that came from within me. And that’s a shame, because “Redemption Song” is one of the most beautiful things anyone ever wrote, sang, and recorded.

That’s true of the version I heard when I was twenty-three and obsessed with both Johnny Cash and Joe Strummer, and it’s very much true of the one that appears on Marley’s Uprising. That version is so simple and stripped-down, just Marley’s guitar and voice, two of the most potent instruments in the history of pop music, framed in an entirely different context than all of the peace-love-understanding jams that make up the rest of that greatest hits compilation. “Redemption Song” is a song about peace and love, in its way, yes, but it’s also about hope and defiance and dignity. The lyrics are simple and direct, too, and the chorus is a call to action: won’t you help to sing these songs of freedom?

I think that’s the thing I love about “Redemption Song,” and something you can hear in that recording from Johnny Cash and Joe Strummer. Whose redemption are we talking about here? It’s a song that’s about finding freedom while singing in the voice of ancestors who were enslaved, and also in the voice of someone who witnessed the murders of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Haile Selassie. There’s something meaningful in hearing this song pass from the writings of Marcus Garvey (“emancipate yourself from mental slavery” and “none but ourselves can free our minds” were his) into the lyrics of Bob Marley, who framed it as an exhortation, and then to these men—a white Southerner who grew up during Jim Crow and a British man whose grandfather worked in the foreign service to colonize India—who heed that call, and help to sing that song of freedom. It’s not theirs, but they sing it anyway.

A lot of people have, which I think matters. There are great recordings from Rihanna, Leon Bridges, Macy Gray, Chris Cornell, Stevie Wonder (who gets very nineties with it), Willie Jones (who delivers an absolute scorcher that’s only on Apple Music), and a million others. Eddie Vedder sang it as a duet with Beyoncé! Every version, I think, restores Bob Marley a little bit, takes him out of the realm of flattened dorm room icon and back into a voice who was about much more than platitudes. And pretty much every version gives me chills, I think specifically because the song asks you to sing it, and so every version you hear is someone both participating in that and also passing the message on to the next person. It’s a song about breaking chains that also moves like an unbroken chain. I think that’s just lovely.