The Deluxe Edition of the album contains an extra CD of classic reggae from the era, as the track listing shown on the rear cover shows.
Reggae had really not been considered a credible music genre before 1973, despite the many late sixties/early seventies chart hits (particularly in the UK).
The release of Bob Marley & The Wailers' Catch A Fire changed that and in the same year came this iconic soundtrack release. The movie of the same name was a low budget, often incomprehensible (a lot of the speech was in Jamaican patois) but highly atmospheric one and the music used that appears on this album was truly outstanding.
The tracks that had already been hit singles are the ones that always catch the eye for most people - Desmond Dekker's catchy and poppy You Can Get It If You Really Want, his 007 (Shanty Town) and Jimmy Cliff's The Harder They Come.
However, it is some of the lesser-known tracks that contain some of the album's most authentic reggae. There is the patois-drenched early roots of Scotty's Draw Your Brakes, the melodious but admonishing Johnny Too Bad from The Slickers and two wonderful cuts from the ebullient Toots & The Maytals - the marvellously lively Sweet And Dandy (a tale of a Jamaican wedding) and Pressure Drop, one of my favourite reggae tracks of all time.
There is also the original Rivers Of Babylon by The Melodians, which is far more roots than the Boney M version everyone knows. Strangely two of the album's most evocative numbers do not contain any reggae rhythms. Jimmy Cliff's Sitting In Limbo is a soulful, gentle number, while the truly iconic Many Rivers To Cross is a plaintive, organ-backed ballad. It is only a short album, and, to be honest, there are many fuller, more complete compilations around, (Trojan Presents: Classic Reggae or Monkey Business: The Definitive Skinhead Reggae Collection to name but two), but the material included on here provides a great bite-sized sample of the irresistible glory of early seventies reggae.
Jimmy Cliff was one of the great late sixties-early seventies reggae artists, along with Desmond Dekker, they were the voices that were on several of the huge hits that had that "reggae with strings" production that commercialised reggae and brought it to the charts. The importance of reggae's pop breakthrough here cannot be over-estimated. It paved the way for Bob Marley to make reggae credible.
To dismiss this material as mere pop chart fare would be wrong. It is feel-good music of the highest order. It brought Jamaican music into the UK mainstream and is hugely culturally important because of it. The highlights are the iconic The Harder They Come, used to great effect in the movie of the same name; the singalong Let Your Yeah Be Yeah; Cliff's cover of Desmond Dekker's You Can Get It If You Really Want; the unusually serious Vietnam; and two songs that actually don't contain any real reggae rhythms - the melodious, soulful Sitting In Limbo and the moving, evocative ballad Many Rivers To Cross. All quality stuff.
