Legend (Bob Marley and the Wailers album)

Content

The album contains all ten of Bob Marley's Top 40 hit singles in the UK up to the time, plus three songs from the original Wailers with Peter Tosh and Bunny Livingston in "Stir It Up", "I Shot the Sheriff" and "Get Up, Stand Up", along with "Redemption Song", the closing song from the album Uprising. Of the original tracks, only four date from prior to the Exodus album.

The cassette tape release of the album featured two extra songs, "Punky Reggae Party", the B-side of the "Jamming" single, and "Easy Skanking" from the Kaya album. A second-generation compact disc remastered by Barry Diament appeared in 1990 on the Tuff Gong label. Although the disc includes the same 14 songs, the tracks are in their original album lengths rather than the edited versions for single release.

On 12 February 2002, the expanded 14-track edition with songs at album lengths were remastered for compact disc with a bonus disc consisting of 1984-vintage remixes for extended dance club singles and dub versions. In 2004, the Legend double-disc deluxe edition was reissued with the music DVD of the same name in the sound + vision deluxe edition. In 2010, Legend was made available as downloadable content for Rock Band, but without the track "Get Up, Stand Up", which was later included on Rock Band 3. In June 2012, a high fidelity audiophile version of the album was released on HDtracks in 96 kHz/24bit and 192 kHz/24bit resolutions. Bruno Tilley was the Art Director & Creative Consultant for the sleeve design work.

Reception

Legend has peaked at number 5 on the Billboard 200, making it Marley's highest-charting album in the US. It also holds the distinction of being the second-longest-charting album in the history of Billboard magazine. Combining its chart life on the Billboard 200 and the Billboard Catalog Albums charts, Legend has had a chart run of 2165 nonconsecutive weeks, surpassed only by Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon at 2166 nonconsecutive weeks. As of the Billboard issue dated 31 January 2026, the album has charted on the Billboard 200 for 923 nonconsecutive weeks, and is only the second album to spend at least 900 weeks on the chart (the first being Pink Floyd's 1973 studio album, The Dark Side of the Moon). As of December 2017, Legend has sold 12.3 million copies in the US since 1991 when SoundScan started tracking album sales, making it the ninth best-selling album of the Nielsen SoundScan era. The RIAA has certified Legend for selling 18 million copies, a total that includes purchases before 1991.

In the United Kingdom, Legend has been certified 13× Platinum, and is the 16th-best-selling album of all time in that country, with sales of over 3,380,000 as of July 2016. As of 28 January 2026, the album has spent 1,222 weeks in the top 100 of the official UK Albums Chart, placing it third on the all-time longevity list.

As of April 2012, the album has sold more than 25 million copies worldwide.

Despite its generally positive reception, Legend has been criticized for being a deliberately inoffensive selection of Marley's less political music, shorn of any radicalism that might damage sales. In 2014 in the Phoenix New Times, David Accomazzo wrote "Dave Robinson, who constructed the tracklist for Legend, [said that] the tracklist for Legend deliberately was designed to appeal to white audiences. Island Records had viewed Marley as a political revolutionary, and Robinson saw this perspective as damaging to Marley's bottom line. So he constructed a greatest-hits album that showed just one face of the Marley prism, the side he deemed most sellable to the suburbs. [...] If you're looking for mass-market appeal to secular-progressive America, you don't include songs that invoke collective guilt over the slave trade, nor do you address the inconvenient truth that the bucolic Jamaican lifestyle of reggae, sandy beaches, and marijuana embraced by millions of college freshmen, exists only because of the brutal slave trade. [...] the songs on Legend offer just a brief glimpse into his music. The definitive album of the most important reggae singer of all time is a hodgepodge collection of love songs, feel-good sentiment, and mere hints of the fiery activist whose politics drew bullets in the '70s." Vivien Goldman wrote in 2015, "when he does get played on the radio now, it's the mellow songs, not the angry songs, that get heard – the ones that have been compiled on albums such as Legend."

Track listings

When first released in the US in 1984, pressings contained remixes of "No Woman, No Cry," "Buffalo Soldier," "Waiting In Vain," "Exodus" and "Jammin'," done in 1984 by Eric Thorngren. (International pressings substituted the remixes for either album versions or 7" edits.) Two versions of the CD were released in Europe in 1984; one used the same mastering as the US pressing, the other (mastered by Barry Diament) used original full length versions for all the tracks. Pressings from 1986 on used the international version of the release until 2002, when a two-disc deluxe version released by Universal replaced all tracks with their respective album versions (except for "No Woman, No Cry," which is the full length version from the "Live!" album) and included the two extra tracks from the cassette release as bonus tracks. That version was released individually as part of "The Definitive Remasters" series. When track No. 13 [Exodus, released on the album "Exodus" by Bob Marley & The Wailers in 1977 by Tuff Gong/Island] begins, the noise at the ending of Bob Marley's "Satisfy My Soul" [released on the album "Kaya" by Bob Marley & The Wailers in 1978 by Tuff Gong/Island] plays at the start.

Original 1984 US album

Original compact disc version

2002 Deluxe edition

''Legend: Remixed'' (2013)

30th anniversary edition (2014)

In celebration of the 30th anniversary, the compilation was re-released (as its "The Definitive Remasters" form) in two formats:

• A tri-color (red, yellow, green) double 180g vinyl set
• A CD/Blu-ray 5.1 audio set; the Blu-ray disc contains the studio version of "No Woman, No Cry" and previously unheard alternate takes of "Easy Skanking" and "Punky Reggae Party."

Charts

Weekly charts

Year-end charts