Burning Spear: Marcus Garvey
Continuing my focus on the music of 1975, coming in at #13 on my Top 20 is the best Reggae album of the year. The album Marcus Garvey by Burning Spear is the first reggae album that I fell in love with on first listen that wasn’t released by Bob Marley. In the U.S. in the 1970s and 80s, it was difficult to hear any reggae that wasn’t by Bob Marley. But once I had access to every reggae album I could want to hear because of my college radio station deejay years, I quickly discovered artists such as Black Uhuru, Gregory Isaacs, Yellowman, Augustus Pablo, and Lee Scratch Perry. Of all of them, Marcus Garvey by Burning Spear became my immediate favorite, and I must have listened to it hundreds of times while walking around campus with my Sony Walkman cassette player. There is a lot of controversy surrounding the different mixes of the album that have been released, and I honestly have no idea which version I used to listen to. Still, I have always loved the record and listen to it regularly 50 years later.
If you are interested in other years, check out my Year in Review series.
To listen to all of the songs of the day, check out the Radio Faux Show Song of the Day playlist.
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