"Get Up, Stand Up" — 'Burnin' ' (1973)
"Get Up, Stand Up" may be the most potent song ever about human rights and the fight to secure them. Marley and Peter Tosh were often at odds about the Wailers' music (for instance, how many Tosh songs should be featured on their albums), but the co-written "Get Up, Stand Up" was a case of two minds thinking as one.
"No Woman, No Cry" — 'Live!' (1975)
It's rare that a live recording becomes the definitive one. But this performance from London's Lyceum Theatre in July 1975, captured in high-def by the Rolling Stones Mobile Studio, takes Marley's great reggae-blues ballad from 1974's Natty Dread to church and beyond. It's said to have been written on a plane ride from Jamaica to London by Marley, who gave writing credit to Vincent "Tartar" Ford, a friend who fed Marley in his public kitchen "in the government yard in Trench Town" when Marley was a poor teen.
"Redemption Song" — 'Uprising' (1980)
Marley worked on this sparse, spiritual acoustic folk ballad for more than a year, a period near the end of his life, during which he often slept just three hours a night. ("Sleep is an escape for fools," he said. "I must be about me father's business.") He held it back when previewing Uprising tracks in 1980 for Island Records chief Chris Blackwell, who then pushed him for more music.
"Trench Town Rock" — Non-Album Single (1971)
"One good thing about music," declares Marley in one of his most indelible lines, "when it hits yuh, y'feel no pain." Though self-produced by the Wailers, this track shows the shadow of Lee "Scratch" Perry, whom the group was working with at the time. It was released in 1971 on the band's label, Tuff Gong, and its sinewy groove ruled Jamaica for much of that year. It introduced Marley's signature "chick-ee" guitar line, which makes its debut here and would help define the reggae sound.
"I Shot the Sheriff" — 'Burnin' ' (1973)
One of Marley's best-known songs, thanks largely to Eric Clapton's hit 1974 cover, "I Shot the Sheriff" has mysterious origins. "Some of it is true, some of it isn't, but I'm not gonna tell you which," Marley said. Actress, documentary filmmaker and former Island Records employee Esther Anderson asserted that Marley wrote the song after discovering she was on birth control — he considered the pills sinful, and the doctor who prescribed the pills was the "sheriff."