Look up a photo of Stafford Elliott with his waist-length dreads and you’ll see why he earned the nickname Fred Locks in his early days at Studio One.
Built around a charmingly wonky melody, this classic from 1975 is roots reggae at its most devotional and, on the dub version here, its most spacey and sparse.
The Black Star Liner has a mythical status in reggae music, representing the Rastafarian dream of being freed from slavery and repatriated “back to Africa”. In this song, Locks dreams of a seven-mile fleet of steamships coming to take his people “home.”
Marcus Garvey, a controversial Jamaican black nationalist much referenced in Rasta lyrics, founded the Black Star Line in America in the early 1920s to transport African-Americans to Libera but its ships were unseaworthy, its finances were chaotic, and the company collapsed when the FBI fitted Garvey up for fraud.
In a final irony, Garvey was repatriated by the US government – to Jamaica, not Africa – following his five-year jail sentence. He’s regarded as a hero by Rastas but far from universally admired, since he forged links with the KKK for his project and blamed the Jews for its failure.
Anyway… it’s a great tune. As was the later Love And Only Love from 1979.