‘Pass It On’ by The Wailers is my Crucial Selection and a song which has always meant a lot to me. It’s almost hymn-like – a stately slow roots reggae tune, intro’d by a gentle Fender Rhodes melody before being propelled by Nyahbinghi hand drums and Bunny Wailer’s gorgeous tenor lead voice.
The composition is credited to Bunny’s wife Jean Watt though Bunny also claimed song-writing credits or at least “traditional adaption”. Speaking to Roger Steffens, Bunny noted that ‘Pass It On’ dated to 1962, the very foundation period of The Wailers. It was originally released on The Wailers’ 1973 album Burnin’.
The sublime vocal harmonies of the classic Wailers trio – Bunny, Peter Tosh, and Bob Marley – are forever etched into my memory as the guide track to a mid-1970s road journey around the East Coast with my family. I was a cranky teenager reclining in the back of a covered ute, listening without headphones to a cassette of Burnin’ on an orange Toshiba tape deck, the songs mixing up with the sweet racket of kihikihi and the simmering arguments of families like mine. It was unusual for us to holiday together and I needed some sonic protection from the inevitable rows as we stopped in camping grounds from Whakatāne to Tokomaru Bay. I found it in the song ‘Pass It On’. The lyrics fitted perfectly with long summer days spent on the beach or under a pōhutukawa:
On a hot, sunny day
Undеr the shadows for rescue
But as the day grows old
I know where the sun is gonna find you
Somehow, ‘Pass It On’ also captured what I sensed was different around me, as we travelled out of suburban Tauranga, Te Ao Pākehā and into Te Ao Māori of the East Coast, hearing Te Reo spoken on the street and being conscious for the first time of being in a racial minority. The kaupapa of the song centres on the collective responsibility to share, rejecting the individualism and vanity of Western life:
Be not selfish in your doings
Pass it on
Help your brothers in their needs
Pass it on
Live for yourself, you will live in vain
Live for others, you will live again
Without being contradictory, ‘Pass It On’ also offers a moral code that guides independent Rasta thinking and, for many years, has guided me too:
It’s your own conscience
That is gonna remind you
That it’s your heart and nobody else’s
That is gonna judge
‘Pass it On’ is a song which led me (via ‘reggae roads’) to meet Bob Marley in 1979 and Bunny Wailer in 2008, to Jamaica and Vanuatu, and back to the East Coast in 2020. Being able to play the Bunny Wailer-produced 45 version of the song on Tauranga’s Majestic Sound System on a warm Waitangi Day at Awatapu lagoon, Whakatāne seemed truly fitting. Little did I know it was to be an early tribute to the great Bunny Wailer who passed in 2021, longing for his lost wife of fifty years, Jean Watt. The lyrics of ‘Pass It On’ remain emblazoned on a mural at Jean and Bunny’s Kingston home as well as in the hearts of millions of reggae lovers around the world.
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Photo by: Michael Wells
