Two nights before he was due to headline the Smile Jamaica concert, on the evening of December 3, 1976, gunmen entered Bob Marley’s home at 56 Hope Road. Marley’s chest was grazed and his arm struck, bobmarley.com records. Rita Marley was hit, a bullet lodging between scalp and skull; manager Don Taylor took five bullets, one near his spine; Marley’s friend Lewis Simpson was shot in the stomach, Billboard recounts. All survived.
Smile Jamaica
On December 5, after much deliberation and with his arm still bandaged, Marley walked onto the Smile Jamaica stage in Kingston and played a 90-minute set to a crowd estimated at 70,000. Then he boarded a private jet for Nassau, spent Christmas in the Bahamas, and in early 1977 flew to London. He would not perform in Jamaica again for more than a year.
London, 1977
Bob Marley and the Wailers convened in February 1977 at Island’s Basing Street studios in Notting Hill and its Fallout Shelter studio, uDiscover Music and Billboard record. Around them the city was in ferment: punk was breaking, the previous summer’s Notting Hill Carnival riot hung over west London, and Marley played football in Hyde Park and kept company with Don Letts and others from the Clash’s orbit. Over 14 months in exile the band cut enough songs for Chris Blackwell to divide them into two albums: Exodus, and the softer Kaya of 1978.
The record
Exodus was released by Island on June 3, 1977. Side one — “Natural Mystic,” “So Much Things to Say,” “Guiltiness,” “The Heathen,” “Exodus” — answers the shooting; side two — “Jamming,” “Waiting in Vain,” “Turn Your Lights Down Low,” “Three Little Birds,” “One Love/People Get Ready” — is love, romantic and universal. Critics at first found it too polished, Billboard notes; the verdict did not hold. In Britain it reached No. 8 and stayed on the chart for 56 consecutive weeks; in the United States it peaked at No. 20. A toe injury sustained playing football with journalists in Paris in May forced the cancellation of the American tour and two of six nights at London’s Rainbow Theatre, per uDiscover — “the one troubling note,” as that account puts it, “at the moment of Marley’s greatest” success.
Album of the century
In 1999 Time named Exodus the best album of the 20th century: “Every song is a classic, from the messages of love to the anthems of revolution. But more than that, the album is a political and cultural nexus, drawing inspiration from the Third World and then giving voice to it the world over.” Runners-up were Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue and Jimi Hendrix’s Are You Experienced? More of its songs appear on Legend, the best-selling reggae album of all time, than from any other Marley record.
Why it matters
The album took its title from the Old Testament and its urgency from a shooting. It is the sound of a Jamaican artist, forced from home, making the case for Jamaica to the whole world — and winning it. He would return to the National Stadium in April 1978.
Listen and dig deeper
- Play Exodus and Kaya in the Listen library. Related archive stories: the ‘Exodus’ remixes and ‘Kaya’ at 40.
- Previously: ‘Catch a Fire’ (1973). Next: the One Love Peace Concert (1978).
Sources: bobmarley.com — Exodus (1977); Billboard — “Bob Marley’s ‘Exodus’ Turns 40: Classic Track-by-Track Review” (2017); uDiscover Music — “‘Exodus’: The Bob Marley Classic That Still Inspires Movements”; Time — “The Best of the Century” (1999); BBC Culture — “Bob Marley’s Exodus: An album that defined the 20th Century” (2022).
Editor’s note: This entry is part of the JamaicansMusic online museum — a career timeline assembled from the archive. It is dated to the era it documents; every claim is drawn from the linked sources.