[CD] BUNNY WAILER • BLACKHEART MAN • U.K. IMPORT

Blackheart Man is the debut album by Bunny Wailer, originally released on 8 September 1976, in Jamaica on Solomonic Records and internationally on Island Records. The songs on the album are regarded as the finest written by Bunny Wailer, and explore themes such as repatriation, Dreamland, and his arrest for marijuana possession Fighting Against Conviction, originally titled Battering Down Sentence. This Train is very loosely based on the American gospel standard of the same name. The album features some of Jamaica's leading musicians and also contributions from Bob Marley and Peter Tosh of The Wailers on backing vocals, and the Wailers rhythm section of Carlton and Aston "Family Man" Barrett on some of the tracks. The origins of the album title goes back to Wailer's childhood in the Jamaican countryside, where he grew up in the same village as his friend Bob Marley.

Bunny Wailer himself considers Blackheart Man to be his best solo album. As he told Jamaican newspaper The Daily Gleaner in June 2009:

I will make good albums, yes, for I have made good albums - Liberation Protest, Struggle, My Father's House, Rock and Groove. All them album is really good album - Marketplace - but Blackheart Man is really an exceptional album, as to the valuation of the message and the amount of people who have received that message and have made themselves better people through them lives within the spiritual and cultural settings that the Blackheart Man exhibits.

This is one of the three Wailers solo albums released in 1976, along with Peter Tosh's album Legalize It and Bob Marley's Rastaman Vibration. The album was listed in the 1999 book The Rough Guide: Reggae: 100 Essential CDs.