Was Bob Marley’s “I Shot The Sheriff” About Birth Control?
“I Shot The Sheriff’ is like I shot wickedness,” Bob Marley said in a 1975 interview. “That’s not really a sheriff, it’s the elements of wickedness. The elements of that song is people been judging you and you can’t stand it no more and you explode, you just explode.”
The song may have been about shooting wickedness, but Marley offered a different take in an interview a year earlier when asked about the meaning of the lyrics. This time he was a bit more blunt. “I want to say ‘I shot the police’ but the government would have made a fuss so I said ‘I shot the sheriff’ instead,” he said. “But it’s the same idea: justice.”
According to the book Wailing Blues — The Story of Bob Marley’s Wailers, Marley seemed to enjoy keeping a shroud of mystery around the song. The book describes when Marley first met Eric Clapton, whose cover of “I Shot The Sheriff” went on to become a #1 hit. Author John Masouri reports that Marley wouldn’t give a direct answer to Clapton about the song’s meaning, telling him some of the lyrics were true but refusing to divulge which ones.
“That’s not really a sheriff, it’s the elements of…
