Toppa Top 10: Ten Cover Songs by Bob Marley and the Wailers

February 6, 2013


One Love/People Get Ready (“People Get Ready” by The Impressions)

Bob Marley One Love

“People Get Ready,” Curtis Mayfield’s best-known hit with the Impressions, has been covered hundreds of times over, by everyone from Bob Dylan and the Band to Prince and Phil Collins. What Bob Marley did with Curtis’ gospel-inspired composition, first on the Wailers’ ska-era version of “One Love” and on the ubiquitous version from 1977’s Exodus album, isn’t so much of a cover as a re-imagining of it. Though it borrows far less liberally from “People Get Ready” than a track like, say, John Mayer’s “Waiting on the World to Change,” there was enough of a resemblance that the 1977 version was re-titled “One Love/People Get Ready.”