The Israelites
The Israelites by Desmond Dekker & The Aces became reggae’s first million seller in 1969 .
History of origin
Desmond Dekker was able to reach number 14 in the UK charts in July 1967 with 007 . Dekker came up with The Israelites while walking in a Jamaican park when he overheard a couple talking about financial difficulties. The next morning he finished the text. It is about the worries of the poor. The Israelites is a biblical metaphor about privation and redemption; you work like a Trojan and suffer like an Israelite. In Jamaican colloquial language, Israelites stands for suffering (poverty, hunger).
The title refers to the suffering of the Israelites , especially during their exile in Babylon and before their departure from Egypt , but refers to the fate of black slaves in America and Jamaica. This topic is also widespread in Rastafarian beliefs, but Desmond Dekker was not a Rasta . The first-person narrator in the lyrics has been abandoned by his wife and children because he could not take care of them. Now that he is keeping himself alive as a rude boy through petty crime, he is afraid of ending up like Bonnie and Clyde , the famous gangster couple of the thirties who were shot by the police.
The tempo of the song is 148 bpm with alla breve counting . The key is B flat major (American Bb major ). The song is harmoniously based on a simple major cadence . But is unusual to use the ladder strange chord D flat major at the end of each phrase (ie in the turnaround ). This point is further accentuated by the of lead guitar and bass guitar as a fast unison - Running played Des-major scale upwards.
success
Recorded with the Aces (Wilson James and Easton Barrington Howard) in Kingston / Jamaica in the small recording studio of the Chinese-Jamaican producer and co-composer Leslie Kong under the original title Poor Me Israelite / (My Precious World) The Man , it was recorded in Jamaica in October 1968 initially released on Kong's Beverley's Records (BV # 21). There it became a hit in underground bars. In early 1969, the song was licensed by Pyramid Records , renamed The Israelites , and released as Pyramid 6058 in March 1969. After the pirate broadcaster Radio Caroline played the title frequently, it quickly gained popularity in Great Britain despite the incomprehensible language. The Caribbean patois dialect made it difficult to understand the content, but did not seem to be an obstacle to sales. In Great Britain alone, the title was sold 250,000 times and reached number one on the charts on April 26, 1969 for a week. A first place was also taken in the Netherlands, Germany, South Africa, Canada, Sweden and Jamaica. In the United States, the timeless lament about Caribbean poverty reached ninth place in the charts. A total of two million copies were sold worldwide by the end of 1969. The Israelites was the first purely Jamaican production that could achieve gold status.
The year 1969 was very favorable for the spread of reggae in the western world, because Harry J. All Stars with The Liquidator and the Upsetters with Return of Django (both October 1969) reached the top 5 of the British charts. The then trend-setting Beatles supported the reggae movement very early on with Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da as an homage to this style of music, which became a British top hit in the cover version of The Marmalade published in December 1968 .
Individual evidence
- ↑ The Metro newspaper , April 18, 2005.
- ^ John Pareles, Obituary: Desmond Dekker, sang 'The Israelites' , The New York Times, May 28, 2006.
- ↑ a b c Wayne Chen, Reggae Routes: The Story of Jamaican Music , 1998, p. 24.
- ↑ Michael de Koningh / Laurence Cane-Honeysett, Young-Gifted-And-Black: The Story of Trojan Records , 2003, p. 117 f.