Get up in the morning, slaving for bread, sir
Pop trivia moment: When the Beatles were recording their magnificent White Album in 1968, Paul McCartney named his "Desmond" character in "Ob-Bla-Di, Ob-Bla-Da" after reggae star Desmond Dekker:
Desmond has a barrow in the market place
Molly is the singer in a band
Desmond says to Molly "girl I like your face"
And Molly says this as she takes him by the hand...
Desmond Dekker, who died last Wednesday aged 64, deserves a musical monument because he paved the road for reggae, an achievement Bob Marley would exploit to the full. Dekker began with ska, which 17-year-old Millie Small took to the top of the charts in 1964 with "My Boy Lollipop", but it was "The Israelites", which merged ska with reggae, while selling more than a million copies, that showed the enormous potential of Jamaican music and established Dekker's fame. As Jon Pareles wrote in this fine obituary in the New York Times, the song, "with its biblical imagery of suffering and redemption, showed the world reggae's combination of danceable rhythm and serious, sometimes spiritual intentions."
Get up in the morning, slaving for bread, sir,
so that every mouth can be fed.
Poor me, the Israelite. Aah.
In a sign of our changing times, if you google for an mp3 of the song, you'll encounter a vast amount of rubbishy links that will have you cursing the fact that you ever used the search engine, but if you go along to YouTube.com, you can enjoy this nostalgic video of Desmond Dekker performing "The Israelites". Is it any wonder that within the 15 months of its existence, YouTube has become one of the internet's most watched websites, with 25 million hits a day? And then there's this: "YouTube Supplants Google, Microsoft, Others In Video Search" from MediaPost. Another huge plus in YouTube's favour is that it has the Hagler-Hearns war of 1985, the greatest three rounds of middleweight boxing you will ever see.
