“Selassie Is The Chapel” by Bob Marley was released on digital platforms for the first time on December 8, 2023.
This release marks JAD Records’ first release in seven years, the label instrumental in introducing Marley to the world through Johnny Nash and Danny Sims. It is being released more than four decades after his untimely departure and ahead of the first Marley biopic set for February 14, 2024.
The rare prayerful gem, written by Bob Marley’s spiritual guide, Mortimer Planno, in 1966, expresses Marley’s Rastafarian spiritual essence but the song’s title and inspiration, however, trace back to the American R&B group The Orioles “Crying in the Chapel” released in 1953.
Planno, who met Haile Selassie when he visited Jamaica in 1966, was a Rastafarian born in Cuba who held fireside Groundations in the slums of Kingston, Jamaica. It was at one of those sessions that Marley met US hitmaker Johnny Nash, who had moved to the island in the late 1960s. Nash then took Bob and Planno to meet music impresario Danny Sims at his Cherry Gardens home and signed Marley to a publishing deal valued at $100 per week in 1968 with JAD and CBS Records.
Sims got Marley’s music in the hands of America stars who at the time had a bigger audience than Bob. “I was out hustling songs,” Danny Sims told the UK’s Independent, adding that through his publishing connections he “got Eric Clapton to do ‘I Shot The Sheriff.’ Barbra Streisand recorded ‘Guava Jelly,‘ among other early Marley compositions.
Other songs like the US and UK top 20 hit ‘Stir It Up,’ which brought Marley his first international success, were recorded by Johnny Nash.
Between 1995 and 2005, JAD Records 15 CDs of Marley music called “The Complete Bob Marley and the Wailers: 1967 – 1972 on which a re-release of “Selassie Is The Chapel” was apart.
Listen below to the original recording below:
