Redemption Song by Bob Marley

Diagnosed with cancer, in pain and facing his own mortality, Bob Marley wrote “Redemption Song” in 1979. Marley had already changed the way the world viewed Reggae music, Jamaica and the Rastafari movement.

With insightful lyrics and a sound that popular culture had never heard before, Bob Marley penetrated deep into the American consciousness, which is evident in his greatest hits album, Legend selling over ten million copies in the United States.

Unlike earlier songs, which featured his band The Wailers, Marley recorded “Redemption Song,” recorded for his seventh album Uprising with a simple acoustic guitar accompaniment. It’s simple presentations echoes back to American folk singers and early works by Bob Dylan filled with social commentary and powerful imagery. There’s something about redemption song that is unique, not only in the protest music but in Bob Marley. Earlier Marley had called out to the world to “Get Up Stand Up” but in “Redemption Song” there was a softer tone, a more personal statement.

Inspired by a speech by Marcus Garvey, urging people to emancipate themselves from mental slavery, Marley composed a song of freedom, a song of hope. He begins in the first verse singing about pirates taking him into physical slavery but “the hand of the almighty” keeping him strong as hi moves forward in his generation. He invites us to sing in his song of freedom because he states “all I ever have, redemption songs.

In the second verse, Marley urges us to free ourselves from a different kind of slavery to free our minds from “mental slavery.” He redirects our fear of atomic energy as they can’t stop who we are and asks us “how long shall they kill our prophet, while we stand aside and look.”

Marley is asking is how we can stand by and watch the things that mean most to us be killed. Instead of focusing on outward fears of nuclear energy, Marley is telling us to look for our spiritual larders, protect what is most important. At the end of the verse Marley states that other people say that we simply have a role to “fulfill the book.” All we are doing is playing falling into place with what others have planned. In this way we truly are slaves and its up to us to free ourselves for this new kind of slavery.

Marley sings that all he ever has is “redemption songs” but “Redemption Song” isn’t one of them. The redemption that Marley asks us to seek is not found in the words and melody of this song, they are found within ourselves. When we finally get there, we can join Marley but until then what we have is this call to freedom.

As the final song on his last album, “Redemption Song” is a powerful statement of the nature of change. Marley can’t make the world change, he can only invite us to think about our lives and do something different. Many people have answered to call to help him sing with him and maybe that’s all we need to do to change the world not through a grandiose speech but through a simple song of freedom.