Jamming

You are locked in with THE ZOO, the listener-supported, commercial-free rock stream that still believes an album side can change the temperature in the room. If the signal has been good to you, the door is open at thezoorocks.com. The record on the deck is Exodus, Island Records, June 3, 1977, and the cut that kicks off side two is “Jamming,” Bob Marley and the Wailers, three minutes and thirty-one seconds of piano, bass, and a chorus that sounds like a handshake.

Robert Nesta Marley was born February 6, 1945, in the hill village of Nine Mile, Saint Ann Parish, Jamaica, to Cedella Malcolm and Norval Marley, a white Jamaican of English descent who was mostly absent. He grew up between the country and the concrete of Trench Town in Kingston, where he met Neville “Bunny” Livingston and later Winston Hubert McIntosh, the man the world would know as Peter Tosh. The teen vocal group that became the Wailers cut ska and rocksteady for Coxsone Dodd’s Studio One, then toughened the sound with Lee “Scratch” Perry. By the early seventies Chris Blackwell’s Island label had them, Catch a Fire and Burnin’ introduced the wider rock audience to “Get Up, Stand Up” and “I Shot the Sheriff,” and after Bunny and Peter stepped away the name on the sleeve became Bob Marley and the Wailers. The engine room stayed Jamaican and familial: Aston “Family Man” Barrett on bass, his brother Carlton “Carly” Barrett on drums, Tyrone Downie on keyboards, Al Anderson and later Junior Marvin on guitar, the I-Threes — Rita Marley, Judy Mowatt, Marcia Griffiths — on the high harmonies. Marley wrote like a man who had read the Bible, the newspapers, and the street at the same time. He died May 11, 1981, in Miami, of melanoma that had started under a toenail, thirty-six years old, already the most widely heard voice to come out of the Caribbean.

Exodus is the album he made in exile. On December 3, 1976, gunmen came through the gate at 56 Hope Road in Kingston and opened fire. Marley was hit in the chest and the arm. Rita was shot in the head and survived. Manager Don Taylor took several rounds. Two days later, arm still dressed, Marley played the Smile Jamaica concert for a crowd estimated around seventy thousand, then left the island. Christmas was spent at Blackwell’s place in Nassau. Early in 1977 the band settled in London and booked Island’s Basing Street studio in Notting Hill and the Fallout Shelter underneath it around the clock. Junior Marvin, who met Marley in London on Valentine’s Day 1977, later said the first things they played were “Exodus,” “Waiting in Vain,” and “Jamming,” each one stretched for the better part of an hour while the lyric was still being finished. Rehearsal tapes from Miami, cut just before the London move, already carry an early pass titled “Jammin’ to the People.” Blackwell split the London haul into two records: Exodus in 1977, the softer Kaya in 1978. Time magazine would later call Exodus the album of the twentieth century. It reached number 8 in Britain and stayed on that chart for fifty-six straight weeks. In the United States it peaked at number 20 on the Billboard 200.

“Jamming” is the hinge. Side one of the original vinyl is the sermon after the shooting: “Natural Mystic,” “So Much Things to Say,” “Guiltiness,” “The Heathen,” and the seven-minute title track. Flip the disc and the piano figure of “Jamming” walks in like the room has decided to breathe. The single went out in Britain in the fall of 1977 and climbed to number 9, twelve weeks in the chart, one of the highest placements Marley ever posted there. It did not dent the American Hot 100, which was typical; the U.S. rock stations that played him were still treating reggae as a visitor. On the lyric sheet the song is party and creed at once. Jah is seated on Mount Zion. No bullet can stop the music. The singer cannot be bought or sold. In Jamaican usage, jamming is the session itself, musicians locking a groove until the clock stops mattering, and Marley keeps both meanings in the air. Keyboardist Tyrone Downie later told biographer Roger Steffens that the verses felt like his and that he had expected a writing credit. The sleeve credits the song to Marley. That argument sat inside a larger one: the Wailers built these tracks as a band, and the publishing did not always say so.

The performance that fixed the song in history came after the album, not on it. April 22, 1978, National Stadium, Kingston, the One Love Peace Concert. Political violence between supporters of Michael Manley’s People’s National Party and Edward Seaga’s Jamaica Labour Party had turned the island grim. Marley had not played a full show at home since Smile Jamaica. During “Jamming” he called both men onto the stage and held their hands together over his head, improvising lines about coming together so the thing could be true. It did not end the bloodshed. It did put the chorus of a side-two single at the center of a national photograph. A toe injury from a football game in Paris that spring had already cost him part of the Exodus touring plan, including dates on the American leg and nights at the Rainbow in London. The record outran the tour.

What a rock listener hears, if the EQ is honest, is a rhythm section that swings harder than most of the boogie bands sharing the dial in 1977. Carly Barrett plays just behind the beat, Family Man Barrett outlines a bass line you can walk to, Downie’s Clavinet and piano keep the off-beats polite and insistent, and the horns and the I-Threes lift the chorus without turning it into a jingle. Island’s London rooms gave the record a polish some Kingston ears called too clean. Play it next to a mid-seventies Rolling Stones side or a Little Feat groove and the kinship shows up: repetition as arrangement, the vamp as the song. Marley was in Hyde Park kicking a ball and crossing paths with the punk scene around Don Letts while these tracks were being cut. “Punky Reggae Party,” recorded in the same season and later tucked onto expanded editions, is the footnote. “Jamming” is the main text.

The catalog that surrounds it is the one rock radio actually kept: Natty Dread, Rastaman Vibration, Exodus, Survival, Uprising, the live Lyceum set that turned “No Woman, No Cry” into a standard. Exodus remains the one where the writing, the band, and the circumstances line up. “Jamming” is the invitation on that record, the track that opens the second half and refuses to choose between a dance and a testimony. The official home for the music and the archive is bobmarley.com. The verified pages that still post from the estate sit at Facebook, Instagram, and X. For the longer shelf of session notes, tour logs, and fan-kept history, the Bob Marley Museum in Kingston remains the place the story is housed. Back here on THE ZOO, the side is still turning.