Bob Marley and the Wailers - The Wailing Wailers At Studio One (1994)

Legendary records are legendary for different reasons—some for the music and some for the musicians. In terms of The Wailing Wailers, it would be tough to locate folks who don’t know the song “One Love” or the name of the fellow singing this song. Bob Marley is enough of a worldwide superstar that his face and his later lyrics are as familiar to American college students as they are to Ethiopian teenagers.

The Wailing Wailers is not, by strict definition, an album—it wasn't recorded or sequenced as a whole. The Jamaican music industry has traditionally been shaped by singles, so this is effectively a singles bundle that was gathered up and released in late 1965. Not only does this highlight the first major recordings of Bob Marley (and it should be noted that most of the songs have Marley writing credits), but the happy, bouncy, optimistic sound of *The Wailing Wailers *is also the sound of post-independence Jamaica. It is the sound of a music that would soon reach out beyond the island and internationally through the remarkable voices of Bunny Wailer, Peter Tosh, and, most of all, Bob Marley.

In addition, *The Wailing Wailers *emerged from Clement “Coxsone” Dodd’s Studio One, one of the foundational, pioneering recording studios where Jamaican music is concerned. Operative from the 1950s through to the early 1980s, Studio One released ska, rocksteady, reggae, and dancehall over the years. The history of Studio One is key to the history of music in Jamaica and the rise of both reggae and Bob Marley.