HAVING worked with Bob Marley since 1973 as a member of his harmony group, the I Three, Judy Mowatt said making music has never been commercial for her.

“When I record music I’m not looking at money, I’m looking at content, and content relating to human situations,” she told the Sunday Observer. “If you record a song in 1972, 1980, 1990 or 2015, it should still be relevant.”

That policy drove Black Woman, the powerful album and song that is considered Mowatt’s signature. Released in 1980, it contains the title track, Strength to go Through, Slave Queen, Sisters Chant and a cover of Marley’s Concrete Jungle.

Now a Christian, 64-year-old Mowatt said the album and title song came from her reading a powerful literary work.

“What inspired Black Woman was a book called To be a Slave by a man called Julius Lester, and it was talking about these women in the US south and their husbands and children being sold to different owners. I was reading all of that and absorbing it and suffering inside, but I didn’t know I was pregnant with the song Black Woman,” she recalled.

The Black Woman sessions began in 1979 and involved a number of top musicians including bass player Howard ‘Spread’ Bedassie, guitarists Dalton Browne and Earl ‘Chinna’ Smith, keyboardists Tyrone Downie and Geoffrey Chung and saxophonist Headley Bennett.

Freddie McGregor, who was an integral part of the production team, played drums, keyboards and provided backing vocals on several tracks.

Recently, singers Suga and Sharon Tucker covered Black Woman. Mowatt appears on both.

Judy Mowatt, who is scheduled to perform alongside I Three colleague Marcia Griffiths in the United Kingdom in May, believes Black Woman (the album) never reached the heights she expected.

“I’m not satisfied, I don’t think it has got the international recognition it deserves. One thing I know, wherever I go in the world, especially Africa, women gravitate to the song,” she said.