One Love, One Heart

When this retrospective collection was first released, it was the definitive document of one of the most powerful roots reggae artists of the 1970s. Despite its skimpy 30-minute length, it contains many of the songs with which Yabby You helped define the classic roots sound — the stern "Anti Christ," the dark and brooding "Run Come Rally," the didactic but sweetly tuneful "Carnal Mind" — all recorded at the Channel One studio with the cream of reggae's session musicians and mixed by dubmaster King Tubby. While this remarkable collection has lost none of its power, it was somewhat overshadowed in 1997 by Jesus Dread, an exhaustive two-disc collection on the Blood & Fire label which contains most of the selections on One Love, One Heart in multiple versions. Strangely, though, the Blood & Fire set does not include "One Love, One Heart," nor does it include the archetypal "Babylon Gone Down" or "Judgment Time" ("Fire, Fire" is repeated on the Blood & Fire set under the title "Fire in a Kingston"). So if you don't feel the need to spend a little extra for almost three hours of Yabby You songs in multiple versions, this single-disc overview is still a wise purchase.