“Get up in the morning slaving for bread Sir”
The intro to “Israelites” – two chords, and Dekker’s naked voice – is one of the most striking in 60s pop. Taken slower than the rest of the verses it’s a moment of absolute authority: stop and listen to this. Immediately the Aces start on the groove: it’s not a particularly heavy groove, it’s mid-paced and supple. Dekker uses the groove as a springboard for two-line, self-contained verses, and the guitar does a lot of the work, joining the dots on Dekker’s snapshot thoughts, leading the listener through.
“Wife and me kids they pack up and leave me”
I first encountered “Israelites” on a Maxell tape ad in the late 80s, where the joke was that Dekker’s lyrics were particularly unintelligible. This isn’t especially true, and the joke feels a little dodgy now, but then I’m used to Jamaican voices in pop. The fact that Maxell picked the song and thought the gag would resonate shows a residual memory of reggae-as-exotica. “Israelites” is far from the first Reggae hit but to get to No.1 still required a serious degree of crossover to a white, pop audience. That audience may or may not have deciphered the lyrics but they were certainly responding to Dekker’s beautiful voice, hitting notes of weariness, defiance, yearning and pride.
“Don’t want to end up like Bonnie and Clyde”
And maybe it wasn’t just gorgeousness they were responding to. The Maxell ad has Dekker showing his lyrics on flashcards, in an echo of Bob Dylan on the “Subterranean Homesick Blues” film. The parallel is there to service the joke but the two songs are cousins – cryptic, disconnected imagery crystallising some kind of hardship and struggle. “Israelites” has a thread of menace in it – “catch me in the farm, you sound the alarm”, and Bonnie and Clyde may have ‘ended up’ dead but they took a few people with them on the way.
The threat is subtle, only implied, but it’s there – Dekker had first hit in the UK singing about rude boy gangsters. And any act of crossover draws attention to tensions as well as potentially smoothing them over. The tensions in this case were racial – Enoch Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” speech in April 1968 had pushed immigration to the top of the political agenda, and though “Israelites” is in no sense a direct response to this, it’s a record that resonates with its times as richly as any Stones or Doors track.
“After a storm there must be a calm”
Political or cultural resonance doesn’t make a pop record great, but “Israelites” also looks to the future. Not just by being one of the first huge reggae crossovers: by singing about and for a tribe, and in oblique fragments, Dekker seems to assume multiple voices, and what “Israelites” ultimately makes me think of is the group rhyme-trading of early hip-hop, different perspectives fighting and uniting over a single beat.
Score: 10
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Yay! A thorougly deserved 10!
Interesting that though “Israelites” was not a direct reaction to Powellism, it was the skinheads/lapsed mods who took it to number one. Its success, and that of reggae in general throughout ’69 (top ten hits for Scratch Perry! And Max Romeo! Was this a golden age or what?), provoked some of the worst racism masquerading as music criticism I’ve ever seen, largely from the pens of disgruntled prog types in the letters pages of MM, NME, Disc, Record Mirror etc.
the ‘golden age’ picture really is appealing. somewhere along the line this ‘real’ vein of the genre fell out of favour with British record buyers didn’t it?* was it the alleged racism of music crits wot wun it?
*but not for a while – obv. still big reggae-based #1 hits to come and equally superb they are too (well one in particular)
… true, all that stuff about reggae being simplistic from guys happy to listen to hour after hour of “tasty” blues rock (from white artists of course) – how many chords does the blues have, you arses??!?!
‘I first encountered “Israelites” on a Maxell tape ad in the late 80s, where the joke was that Dekker’s lyrics were particularly unintelligible.’
To be fair they were portrayed as no more decipherable than The Skids ‘Into The Valley’ and whatever other song was featured in the ads. Although you could well argue that Dekker is much easier to understand here than Richard Jolson.
… nice Freudian slip there!
I had totally forgotten the other ads! Oh well there goes that bit of my argument
Call for Dr Freud! (xpost, haha)
I always get to wondering what elevates particular records to this kind of status. “Israelites” is great, certainly, but no more so than a massive slew of other awesome reggae records around this time, from Beverley’s and beyond. A few were hits in the UK, most weren’t, obv, but none has the status of this one. Yet for the life of me I can’t hear what sets it apart form all the other insanely catchy, danceable stuff.
Or, to put it another way: I am a bad pop critic because I am constitutionally unable to spot a hit.
‘Jolson’ I took from a quick Google, not realising the article was illustrating a mistake printed on the ‘Fanfare’ LP itself!
To answer Tim’s question, it must have something to do with distribution and availability perhaps? I’ve always been a bit mystified as to why “The Return of Django” was such a monster hit, f’rinstance Actually Tim wasn’t asking a question…
“Israelites” was almost certainly the first reggae track i ever heard and the sheer oddness and exoticism of it must have struck me forcefully and its (lyrical) incomprehensibilty was part of its attraction too, I’m sure (I don’t actually remember)
Basically, in answer to Tim’s query, Trojan got their (A&R/promotion/distribution) act together and a few other labels (B&C e.g.) took note and followed suit. Just as well since, despite their chart success, you didn’t exactly hear The Liquidator or Long Shot Kick De Bucket being spun in rotation on daytime Radio 1 (I think Peel and Mike Raven were the only R1 DJs giving airplay to any reggae during that period). And of course “Wet Dream” was not only not played at all, but on the Top 40 rundown had to be announced as “a record by Max Romeo.” It stayed in the Top 40 for nearly six months…
Tim isn’t it not so much that you’re a bad pop critic but that you’re too close to the material to see “Israelites” as pop rather than reggae (maybe this is saying the same thing)? It has the status because it was a huge hit. There’s no inherent quality there (well, there is, and my write-up is trying to explain what *I* hear in it, but I might well have given 9 or 10 to a lot of those other records too).
My pet theory/suspicion is that critics retain a faith in the charts and public tastes when its genres they don’t really understand or know much about, even if they then belittle public tastes when it comes to their more familiar beat.
i think i only heard israelites much later, but some of its pull for me is actually familiarity rather than strangeness, i think, or else the combination — def.for me there’s a “church music” feel to it which is NOT like “most pop of the time”
obviously some of this is the words (i think i had sung the “slaves chorus” from nabucco in choir as a teen, which is very similar territory lyrically), but i think also in the music itself, the presence and the delivery and the authority and the call-and-response and other stuff i can’t point to w/o rehearing the song
(i never felt this same pull of familiarity with gospel, mind you) (again i’d have to close-listen to pinpoint the differences, but there’s somehow something more “anglican” abt its churchiness than “baptist”) (this is getting nuts so i will stop)
Actually, now you come to mention it, I remember feeling that there was a church-y religious feel to this song but, to me, that only added to its weirdness… as a pop song I mean
i grew up very rural and fairly solitary as a child — my parents were both big beatles fans but we never listened to the radio, and pop as a WHOLE was a bit of a mystery to me till i was about 15, when i suddenly noticed it was a big deal to everyone except me (but bcz i had a nice voice when wee i was in choirs and stuff all through this time and knew a lot about classical music)
so age 15-19 i went on an insane crash-course of catching up — including polling all my chums LJ-style about “what should mark s listen to in rock”!! — but during most of this time, a lot of very popular pop and rock was still quite exotic to me
“israelites” when i encountered it (i would think 77 or 78) really was an unusual case of “hey i know what’s going on here!” words-wise
I think Marcus’s memory is not entirely accurate when he says that ‘Liquidator’ and ‘Long Shot Kick De Bucket’ were not getting airplay on Radio 1. I remember those tracks very clearly and they seemed to get a lot of play.
But now my own thoughts about that time are crystallising a little. This – when I was 14 going on 15 – was the time when I found myself for the first time getting embroiled in popular tribal culture. And my culture was the one that hung about the record department and listened to the Velvets, Leonard Cohen, the Incredible String Band and other exotica. The other side was the skinheads, and ironically it was they (and not young black kids, not in suburban Hertfordshire anyway) who had those as their anthems – so we didn’t touch them!
All the same, Israelites stood out as something fresh and different and crossed over tribal alliances, no doubt this was why it was such a big hit. I really don’t think a sense of racial tension had much to do with it; it was simply a good song that stood out. The lyric really did have a reputation for incomprehensibility and you are almost certainly right, Tom, when you point out that we weren’t used to hearing Jamaican patois in those days.
A 10 is fair enough, although I’m a tad miffed that this should get one rather than Grapevine!
Not on the JY prog they didn’t.
But I was at school when the JY prog was on! I’m thinking more of the ones that were on when I got home from school – Dave Cash, I think, and David Symonds. Hey, it’;s amazing the forgotten names you remember when you put your mind to it!
Oh, those moments when the DJ on the chart rundown couldn’t even read out the title were great, weren’t they? Wings’ “Give Ireland Back To The Irish” was a bizarre example. Then there was the time when Tony Blackburn, contempt oozing from every syllable, announced “Too Drunk To F—“ as “a record by a group choosing to call themselves The Dead Kennedys”.
Yeah I don’t think Israelites screams “racial tension” – it’s more that there’s a hint of menace to it, and within the hint of menace there’s a hint of racial tension.
Blimey, yes, I had forgotten about Dave Cash and his hilarious sidekick Microbe (“Groovy baby”). Stuart Henry and Emperor Rosko as well – actually there were loads!
*and Kenny Everett, though I don’t recall him being big on reggae*
Blackburn didn’t like reggae I think
Only the nice, melodic stuff with Johnny Arthey’s Willesden Sound string overdubs.
When Radio 1 was launched, it came with a commitment to ‘live music’ – ie keeping BBC house musicians gainfully employed. So every so often what you’d get wasn’t the recording of the moment, but an utterly cringeworthy ‘cover’ by a studio singer with orchestra.
I think they’d given up by 1969 though, hadn’t they?
The first time I remember hearing this was in the movie “Drugstore Cowboy.” It was one of those records I bought and played about ten times straight. To me, the menace is in the understatement of the guitar, drums, and the precise manner in which Dekker enunciates each syllable: the accumulated effect is like the sound of a straight razor being sharpened on a leather strop.
When Dekker died recently, the obits were the first time I became aware that he’d had a long and important career before and after this song. (In America, he was a one-hit wonder.) Does anyone have any suggestions for a CD collection that would be a good starting point to learning about the rest iof his music?
when i was a little kid i used to get this mixed up with brenton wood’s ‘oogum boogum’!
My first encounter woth reggae was the soundtrack to ” The Harder They Come ” and really never connected that Desmond Decker with the Israelite song.
Wolfe : if you want some roots shanty-town reggae, the soundtrack to The Harder They Come ” is a great sampler …..with many of the songs now listed as classics
“Israelites” sounds less generically Jamaican than most other reggae, including (the even better, in my opinion) “007 Shanty Town,” whose beauty is more comforting to me for being less exquisite. (If that makes any sense.) “Israelites” is one of those songs like David Banner’s “Cadillac On 22s” that defies taxonomy. It isn’t that you can’t categorize them so much as the they still seem odd for their category.
Mark’s on the money in regard to the “churchiness,” though I’d add that – for me, anyway – it’s not “churchiness,” as you’d get (or I’d get) through church or through what’s generally thought of as “gospel,” whose secularized spawn was all over the radio either in the form of the vocal harmony soul groups or the call-and-response shouters. Rather it’s the sound of “spirituals” you’d find on “folk” anthologies. So the sound of the “Israelites,” when I heard it – managed to miss its run on the Top 40, so didn’t run across the record until late ’70s – did feel familiar to me, as I’d been a folk fan as a wee ‘un. I think of “Motherless Child” and “Wayfarin’ Stranger” as prototypes for me of the “spiritual” sound, though come to think of it neither is all that spiritual. I’d known “Wayfarin’ Stranger” from an old Burl Ives 78 owned by my parents.
I think there is a tendency in Jamaica’s sound and particularly Bob Marley’s towards melodies that resemble “spirituals,” which may be why reggae in general and Marley in particular did better among North Americans than did other Caribbean musics. Reggae took a while to score in the United States, however. As far as I know, “Israelites” was one of only two Jamaican songs to hit in the U.S. in the ’60s, the other being “My Boy Lollipop.”
Classic song in all ways. I first heard it in the car with my mother sometime in the late 90’s; I remember her turning up the volume excitedly, declaring something to the effect of “This is one of the weird ones, you’ll like this!” Yet another track that, if it was ever in regular US radio rotation, was gone by the time I was growing up. But what a fantastic song. If I heard more reggae that reminded me of this I’d be a fan – there’s something I don’t hear elsewhere in “Israelites”‘s rolling shuffle forward, some sort of weird momentum where once you wind the song up it never hits a beat that would really be the logical place to stop. The general sound pallette is part of this too, the way everything sounds something between muffled, underwater, and cavernous. The only point of connection I can think to make is to something like “Sincerely,” by the Moonglows, where the rawness of the recording combines with the spareness of the arrangement to create a sound that inevitably ends up being described as “timeless.”
And yet – is there something more timely to “Israelites”? Tom and others are talking about racial tensions in Britain at the time – but what about that country over in the Middle East, the one named Israel? Certainly in the headlines in this time period. Obviously Dekker is drawing on a gospel/Biblical/spiritual tradition; his character is comparing his sufferings to those of the ancient Israelites. But did he also strike some more contemporary nerve?
Casino, it wasn’t a mere comparison: For Dekker and his prime audience, “The Israelites” made a very up-to-date religous reference. This is from Wikipedia:
Rastafarians believe that the black races are the true Children of Israel, or Israelites, as they like to call themselves. Using the Bible they also conclude that Haile Selassie of Ethiopia is the returned messiah who will lead the world’s peoples of African descent into a promised land of full emancipation and divine justice.
One Rasta sect, called the Twelve Tribes of Israel, imposes a metaphysical system whereby Aries is Reuben, Aquarius is Joseph, etc. With his famous early reggae song The Israelites Desmond Dekker immortalised the Rastafarian concept of themselves as the Children of Israel.
And you only gave Grapevine a 9?
he hates soul! we’ve established this!
I’m glad I’m not the only one who remembers the Maxell adverts! I recalled that there were other ones, but I couldn’t have told you which songs they were. I wonder if that, in itself, tells you something about the power of this song? Or maybe it was just reinforced by the other advert whose name a dare not mention – after all, I’m of an age to remember Musical Youth singing ‘007’.
The other memory I have connected to this song is that my parents went to a big university reunion where Desmond performed and said he was excellent. He seemed to see the funny side of all the “baked beans for breakfast” gags too.
I don’t have the sort of personal love for this song that would make me give it a 10 – but I can’t argue against it.
This was actually a hit in the US some months later, though something less than #1. (And, to be honest, most Americans thought it was some odd thing with Jamaicans singing about the Middle East, as most Americans knew nothing of Rastafarians then. I’m not sure that most would think differently today.)
Nothing, truly nothing ever heard on US pop music radio sounded like this before. The timbre of Dekker’s voice, the oddly tuned (and played) guitar, the strange harmonies of the backing vocals, and the “ticky” beat sounded dissonant as a whole to those unused to such things, but it was undeniably compelling, at least to those who didn’t find it unendingly irritating. But then there are those who find anything different irritating, and I suppose this first reggae hit in the US set off some sort of “Fear of a Black Planet” in those susceptible to such fears. (I recall that the radio DJs kept calling the group “English” rather than Jamaican.)
But I had just completed high school and, because my family actually was poor by American standards, I had to go to work. (It would be many years before Doctor Mod became a doctor.) Even if I didn’t truly understand what this song was about, I surely could relate to its first line. It wasn’t what I’d planned on doing–but, no, I didn’t want to end up like Bonnie and Clyde. I’d seen that movie too.
Stand fast, Tom–it’s a genuine 10.
Never connected with this as a child except maybe for novelty value. I agree with the earlier posts that it wasn’t played much on the radio as otherwise I’m sure it would have left a bigger impression on me. Yes unfortunately its the margarine ad that we all know and love that brought it into focus much more than being a number one from this period. I once covered this with my band without actually knowing what the lyrics were (the days before the interweb) – I made most of them up – funnily enough no one noticed !
I saw Desmond Dekker play the Lewisham People’s Festival in the summer of 1994. The songs were better than the band, but then, who was complaining? It was reggae legend Desmond Dekker in the park! Also on a rather odd bill were John Hegley and Eddie Izzard.
When I was a child, Dekker was frequently in the local papers in articles for which the tone was always “Rock legend Desmond Dekker lives in *Lewisham*!”
I didn’t realise this wasn’t just “the music from the Vitalite advert” until 2008. I am pop illiterate! Definitely a 10 though.
The misheard lyric feature of this was set in stone and you could make up your own pic and mix – “my ears are alight”, “strawberries for breakfast” and all the rest of it. Once everyone had stopped laughing at themselves, delighted at their own wit, they listened to the record and concluded that they were in the presence of something quite extraordinary. The fact that the skins latched onto it has got nothing to do with it other than to remind people from later generations of the basic history of the youths of the period back then. This is undoubtedly a monster of a record. And that opening is just sublime.
the mods were into black music and evolved into skinheads. the skins protected Dekker and other jamaican artistes at the time and genuinely loved the music. Dekker was a religious man so there are gospel undertones in there. There is a trojan double CD of desmonds Beverleys recordings from Ska through to Israelites..
One was a stringy who loved fisherman’s hats. The other was short, thick and had logs through his ears. They ran our radio station Punk and Ska program.
I can remember when the stringy one, casual flicking through our thousands of vinyl discs, called out in surprise and devotion. He ran up holding “Israelites”. We were herded into the production studio and given an education, and to this day it was one of my favourite moments in my years lazing about the studio.
Before this point I had ignored reggae, but then again at this point reggae wall all Marley and not much else. I preferred ska, but my knowledge didn’t extend past Madness, UB40, The Impression That I Get and some then popular Australian bands. Israelites tied everything together and opened up more, and my listening experience is richer because of it.
The three best gigs I’ve seen were the three Desmond Dekker gigs I saw. First one was in 2003 so he was elderly to say the least but an incredibly energetic performer and in great voice, still doing the falsetto bits. His keyboardist had the nastiest sound I’ve ever heard and tbh the whole band were a bit weddingy but they really weren’t anyone’s focus. The Selecter were the support on the first two as well. I almost met DD backstage but a bunch of skins were getting a bit geezery with him and he put a towel over his head and waved us away just as I got to him.
RIP. A well deserved 10 and 007 and It Mek would be 10s for me too.
Critic watch:
1001 Songs You Must Hear Before You Die, and 10,001 You Must Download (2010)
Bruce Pollock (USA) – The 7,500 Most Important Songs of 1944-2000 (2005)
Dave Marsh & Kevin Stein (USA) – The 40 Best of the Top 40 Singles by Year (1981) 35
Dave Marsh (USA) – The 1001 Greatest Singles Ever Made (1989) 855
Greil Marcus (USA) – STRANDED: “Treasure Island” Singles (1979)
Pitchfork (USA) – Top 200 Songs of the 60s (2006) 10
Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (USA)- The Songs That Shaped Rock (Additions 2011)
The Recording Academy Grammy Hall of Fame Albums and Songs (USA)
2FM (Ireland) – Top 100 Singles of All Time (2003) 33
Guinness Book of Hits of the ’60s (UK, 1984) – Jo Rice’s Top 10 Songs
Mojo (UK) – The Ultimate Jukebox: 100 Singles You Must Own (2003) 6
New Musical Express (UK) – The Top 100 Singles of All Time (1976) 86
Paul Roland (UK) – CD Guide to Pop & Rock, 100 Essential Singles (2001)
Q (UK) – The 1001 Best Songs Ever (2003) 522
Q (UK) – The Ultimate Music Collection (2005)
Q (UK) – Top 20 Singles from 1954-1969 (2004) 19
Zig Zag (UK) – Gillett & Frith’s Hot 100 Singles (1975)
Gilles Verlant and Thomas Caussé (France) – 3000 Rock Classics (2009)
Hervé Bourhis (France) – Le Petit Livre Rock: The Juke Box Singles 1950-2009
Toby Creswell (Australia) – 1001 Songs (2005)
Giannis Petridis (Greece) – 2004 of the Best Songs of the Century (2003)
Jamaican Poll – The Top 100 Jamaican Songs of 1957-2007 (2009) 7
I remember hearing this played some time in 1969 at an end of term party at my junior school and finding it slightly bewildering if enjoyable. I was familiar with the ‘Israelites’ from Bible Stories at school but couldn’t understand what this had to do with them. Despite its upbeat rhythms the song has a hint of melancholy that runs through the performance and gives it a complexity which isn’t immediately obvious.
An easy 10/10 for me. Just a glorious record in my view.