What was the best-selling reggae song of the 1970s?
From chocolate milk to John Barnes, the island nation of Jamaica has made countless contributions to the cultural landscape of the world over the years, but perhaps its greatest export has been reggae music.
Born from the post-independence ska and rocksteady rhythms, the distinctive sound of reggae has been blasting from sound systems and speakers across the globe since back in the 1960s. During those early days, laid-back reggae sounds were largely confined to the studios and clashes of Jamaica itself, but it didn’t take very long for the rest of the world to cotton on to the power of the music.
With the record collections of the Windrush Generation arriving in post-war Britain, early ska and reggae sounds were quickly adopted by the blossoming mod and skinhead subcultures during the 1960s. It didn’t take long for those underground sounds to burst onto the mainstream, though, with the pop power of ‘My Boy Lollipop’ dominating the charts in 1964, only a few years before Desmond Dekker scored the very first reggae number-one with 1969’s ‘Israelites’.
Reggae might have made its mark on the musical landscape of the 1960s, but it was during the following decade that it really ballooned. Audiences in both America and the UK became infatuated with the distinctive tones of Jimmy Cliff back in 1972, thanks to the soundtrack of Jamaica’s first blockbuster, The Harder They Come, but even that cinematic masterpiece couldn’t rival the all-encompassing power of reggae’s ultimate hero, Bob Marley.
Marley had already cut his teeth in the ska scene of the previous decade, performing with The Wailers, but it was his solo career that really cemented his legendary reputation within the genre. 1973’s Catch a Fire was the first of his albums that seemed to launch him on an international scale, thanks in no small part to the distribution power of Island, but ultimately, there was no stopping his rise to the top from there.
With his insurmountable reputation throughout the musical landscape, it should come as no real surprise that Marley boasted one of the biggest-selling reggae songs of the 1970s, in the form of his defining track, ‘No Woman, No Cry’. Originally released in 1974 from his Natty Dread album, a live version of the song released as a single the following year arguably became the defining version, reaching number 22 in the UK charts and becoming a bona fide platinum-selling record.
Still, that song’s title among the best-selling reggae tracks of the decade did not go uncontested. Hot off the success of ‘Israelites’, Desmond Dekker had some major success with his recording of Jimmy Cliff’s’ You Can Get It If You Really Want’, which peaked at number two in the singles chart back in 1970, despite selling considerably fewer copies than Marley’s effort.
If the greatest-selling reggae track of the decade is purely a numbers game, though, then Boney M’s version of The Melodians’ Rastafari anthem ‘Rivers of Babylon’ seems to take the crown. It did, after all, spend five weeks at the top of the charts.
Arguably, the reggae origins of the track are somewhat lost in Boney M’s rendering of the song, so Marley might regain his crown after all, but ultimately it is up to your own definition of that endlessly enduring genre.
