Get Up Stand Up

Here is a song that does not ask politely. “Get Up Stand Up,” the opener on Burnin’, the 1973 Island Records album by Bob Marley and The Wailers, walks into the room the way a great rock record walks in: a riff that will not sit still, a vocal that means the words, and a band that already knows the arrangement will outlive the session. It was written by Bob Marley and Peter Tosh, sung by both of them, and it remains the closest thing reggae ever cut to a straight-up rock anthem without borrowing the costume. Mick Jagger has called it his favorite reggae song. That is not a small endorsement from a man who spent the early Seventies hanging around the same Island studios where Chris Blackwell was turning a Kingston vocal group into an international rock-circuit act.

Robert Nesta Marley was born February 6, 1945, in the rural parish of Saint Ann, Jamaica, to a Black Jamaican mother, Cedella Malcolm, and a white British father, Norval Marley, a superintendent of the Crown who was mostly absent. The boy who would become the most recognizable face in Jamaican music grew up between the countryside and the concrete yards of Trench Town in Kingston, where he met Neville “Bunny” Livingston and Winston Hubert McIntosh, the man the world would know as Peter Tosh. The three of them came up under the tutelage of Joe Higgs, learned harmony the hard way, and cut their first records for Coxsone Dodd’s Studio One in the mid-Sixties as The Wailers, alongside the Barrett brothers, Aston “Family Man” on bass and Carlton “Carly” on drums. Those early sides were ska and rocksteady. By the time Island signed them, the music had thickened into roots reggae, and Blackwell heard something that would travel the same rooms as the rock bands on his label.

Burnin’ was the second Island album and the last by the original trio. The basic tracks were cut at Harry J’s studio in Kingston. Mixing and overdubs happened at Island’s Basing Street Studios in London in the spring of 1973, between dates supporting Catch a Fire, the record that had introduced them to the rock press. Bunny Wailer later said “Get Up Stand Up” was left until last because it was the easiest track on the album, unison singing over a groove the band already owned. Tosh played guitar, organ and piano and took a verse. Bunny handled congas and bongos and stacked the harmonies. Family Man and Carly locked the rhythm section the way they always did, which is to say they made it sound inevitable. Earl “Wya” Lindo was on keyboards. The single went out on Island with “Slave Driver” on the flip in some territories. The album itself arrived in October 1973, burned orange sleeve, the three of them standing in a haze of smoke that was not only about the herb.

The writing has a road story attached to it. Esther Anderson, the Jamaican actress who was with Marley at the time and who had co-starred with Sidney Poitier in A Warm December, has said she and Bob sketched the song in about twenty minutes on a chartered flight from Haiti back to Jamaica in February 1973. Blackwell had them hopping the islands. Haiti under Jean-Claude Duvalier was poor in a way that stuck with Marley. Anderson has also said she was pushing him toward a harder rebel stance, the kind she had watched up close during years around Marlon Brando. Whether every detail of that flight story is airtight, the lyric reads like a man who has just seen people told to wait for heaven. The chorus refuses the bargain. Stand up for your rights. Don’t give up the fight. Most people think great God will come from the sky. The writers were Rastafari, and the verse about preaching and the Almighty is as much a rejection of passive Christianity as it is a political slogan. Tosh, who had studied the American civil-rights speakers and who wanted a co-write on a track that would actually get played, took the line about sick and tired of the ism and schism. After he left the group he cut his own version for the 1977 album Equal Rights and kept singing it like a personal constitution.

Listeners with rock ears have long noticed that the chorus melody sits close to the instrumental hook in War’s 1971 hit “Slippin’ Into Darkness.” Marley admired War and knew players in that band. He did not copy the record. He took a shape he liked and turned it into a chant a stadium could sing without a lyric sheet. That is the same move rock bands have made since the blues: find the phrase that already lives in the body and put new words on it. On stage the song became the closer more often than not. Ben Harper has told the story of a 1978 show at the Starlight Amphitheatre where Tosh walked out unannounced during the number, took the microphone, and sang his verse to a roar. Around the same time, while Tosh was out with the Rolling Stones, he and Jagger turned up at a Marley date in Los Angeles and the old partnership flashed back to life for a chorus. The last time Marley himself sang it in public was September 23, 1980, at the Stanley Theater in Pittsburgh, the room now called the Benedum Center. The cancer had already reached his brain. He did the set from a stool, closed with a long “Get Up Stand Up,” and collapsed afterward. He died in Miami on May 11, 1981, at thirty-six.

The catalog kept moving. The 1973 recording was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1999. Rolling Stone later put the song at the top of its list of Marley’s greatest. The Guardian ranked it near the top of theirs. Amnesty International has used the title for campaigns. None of that paperwork is why the track still works on a rock station. It works because the groove is mean and simple, because Tosh and Marley trade the lead like two guitarists who do not need a solo to win the argument, and because the lyric does not blink. Burnin’ also holds “I Shot the Sheriff,” “Burnin’ and Lootin’,” and the Tosh songs “One Foundation” and “Stop That Train.” After this album Bunny and Peter walked. Marley kept the name, brought in the I-Threes, and built the band that filled parks and arenas. The original three never made another record together.

If you want the man and the music in one place, the official home is bobmarley.com. The official pages are on Facebook, Instagram, and X. The band that still carries the Wailers name, led by Aston Barrett Jr., keeps its own door at thewailers.com. And this is The Zoo, where the deep cuts and the anthems share the same shelf. “Get Up Stand Up” does not need a speech in front of it. It already is one. Turn it up, and stand where you are.