DESMOND DEKKER AND THE ACES - “Israelites”
(#269, 19th April 1969)
“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. 10
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Dadaismus on September 15th, 2006
Yay! A thorougly deserved 10!
Marcello Carlin on September 15th, 2006
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.
FT's Steve Mannion on September 15th, 2006
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)
Dadaismus on September 15th, 2006
… 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??!?!
FT's Steve Mannion on September 15th, 2006
‘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.
Dadaismus on September 15th, 2006
… nice Freudian slip there!
FT's Tom on September 15th, 2006
I had totally forgotten the other ads! Oh well there goes that bit of my argument :)
FT's Tim Hopkins on September 15th, 2006
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.
FT's Steve Mannion on September 15th, 2006
‘Jolson’ I took from a quick Google, not realising the article was illustrating a mistake printed on the ‘Fanfare’ LP itself!
Dadaismus on September 15th, 2006
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)
Marcello Carlin on September 15th, 2006
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…
FT's Tom on September 15th, 2006
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.
FT's pˆnk s lord sükråt cunctør on September 15th, 2006
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)
Dadaismus on September 15th, 2006
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
FT's pˆnk s lord sükråt cunctør on September 15th, 2006
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
FT's rosie on September 15th, 2006
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!
Marcello Carlin on September 15th, 2006
Not on the JY prog they didn’t.
FT's rosie on September 15th, 2006
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!
Erithian on September 15th, 2006
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”.
FT's Tom on September 15th, 2006
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.
Marcello Carlin on September 15th, 2006
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*
Dadaismus on September 15th, 2006
Blackburn didn’t like reggae I think
Marcello Carlin on September 15th, 2006
Only the nice, melodic stuff with Johnny Arthey’s Willesden Sound string overdubs.
FT's rosie on September 15th, 2006
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?
FT's wwolfe on September 15th, 2006
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?
blount on September 15th, 2006
when i was a little kid i used to get this mixed up with brenton wood’s ‘oogum boogum’!
Brian on September 15th, 2006
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
FT's koganbot on September 15th, 2006
“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.”
Doctor Casino on September 15th, 2006
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?
FT's koganbot on September 15th, 2006
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.
Mark Gamon on September 15th, 2006
And you only gave Grapevine a 9?
blount on September 15th, 2006
he hates soul! we’ve established this!
Chris Brown on September 16th, 2006
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.
FT's Doctor Mod on September 16th, 2006
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.
intothefireuk on September 18th, 2006
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 !
Billy Smart on March 8th, 2008
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*!”