Legend (Bob Marley & The Wailers album)



Legend is a compilation album by Bob Marley and the Wailers, released in 1984 by Island Records, catalogue BMW 1 in the United Kingdom and 90169-1 in the United States. It is essentially a greatest hits collection of singles in its original vinyl format, and the best-selling reggae album of all-time, with over 15 million copies sold in the United States and an estimated 25 million copies sold globally. In 2003, the album was ranked number 46 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time.

, it had spent a total of 413 nonconsecutive weeks on the Billboard 200 album chart&mdash;the fourth longest run in history. According to the 20 September 2014 edition of the Billboard 200, nearly 56,000 albums had been sold since some earlier edition, bringing the new peak of the album to #5 on the chart (primarily due to a Google Play discount price of 99 cents). Currently, the album sells approximately 3,000 to 5,000 US copies per week.

Content
The album contains all ten of 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 the closing song from the album Uprising, "Redemption Song." Marley enjoyed fewer chart hits in the United States, "Exodus," "Waiting in Vain," "Could You Be Loved" and "Buffalo Soldier" the only ones included on this collection. 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 to 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. However, it was released without "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.

Reception
Legend 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 Top Pop Catalog Albums charts, Legend has had a chart run of 992 non-consecutive weeks, surpassed only by The Dark Side of the Moon at 1574 weeks. As of the issue date of 28 September 2013, the album has charted on the Billboard 200 for 285 non-consecutive weeks. As of October 2014, the album has sold 11,660,000 copies in the US since 1991 when SoundScan started tracking album sales, making it the ninth best-selling album of the Nielsen SoundScan era.

In the United Kingdom, Legend has been certified 11× Platinum, and is the 16th best-selling album in that country of all time, with sales of over 3,380,000 as of July 2016.

As of December 2014, the album has sold more than 33,000,000 copies worldwide.

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 Rob Fabroni and Barry Dimanent) 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 would be released individually as part of the "The Definitive Remasters" series.

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."