"The Israelites" /
Desmond Dekker & the Aces

Ska or reggae?  You decide.

And does it matter?  When this song came out in the spring of 1969, hitting #1 in the UK, Canada, Sweden, and the Netherlands -- even edging into the US Top Ten -- most people outside of Jamaica didn't know the difference and didn't care. Dekker's strong Jamaican accent, the relatively simple production, that heavy bassline all told us it was "island music." It didn't occur to me to wonder why a guy from Jamaica would be singing about people from Israel.  All I knew was (cue up the American Bandstand theme) it had a great beat and you could dance to it.

So tonight I'm watching old episodes of the daffy British slapstick comedy Doctor in the House (thank you, YouTube!) -- a show I used to watch in re-runs on late-night Indianapolis PBS with my brother and sister. It was the summer of '75, the last time we all three were living at home, and our nightly rendezvous with this mad Britcom was essential. Around 10pm we'd drive out to the 24-hour Marsh supermarket (quite a novelty in those days, that all-night schedule) to buy our customary Doritos and Pepsi and Nabisco's Famous Cookies assortment, then race home in time for that perky theme song. Good times, good times . . . I can still hear Holt's mad cackle in my heart.

But I digress. In the episode I watched tonight, the show's hero, med student Michael Upton (played by Barry Evans, if you must know), can't study because his dorm room is so noisy. And lo and behold, what record is his neighbor rudely blasting at top volume? Yes, this 1969 hit, probably still on the charts when this episode first aired. Jeez, I hadn't thought about this song in probably 40 years.
But what a great song it is.

Desmond Dekker said this song just flew into his head, one night while he was walking through a park in a poor section of Kingston and overheard a couple arguing about money. It's as if he just transcribed the man's lament: "Get up in the morning, slavin' for bread / So that every mouth can be fed / Oh, oh, me Israelite." The dogged syncopation is just right -- it really makes you feel how weary the singer is from his daily dutiful grind. I love how the Aces join in on those doleful "oh's," as if consoling him -- or maybe just reminding us how many others are bowed down by the same hopeless struggle.

Ah, the Biblical references of reggae -- like "Rivers of Babylon," a song I wouldn't hear until 2 years later when I saw The Harder They Come. But when you think about it, it makes perfect sense. You don't even have to know that Rastafarians identified with the Lost Tribes of Israel. It's like African-American slaves in the cotton fields, singing "Go Down, Moses," a coded message protesting their own enslavement. All poor Jamaicans, not just the Rastas, knew what it felt to labor for a foreign king, remembering Zion.

In the second verse, his wife's left him; in the third he woefully describes his raggedy clothes -- "shirt them-a tear up, trousers is gone" (though I'm sure in 1969 I could not decipher those lyrics; thanks, internet!). I did get the next line: "Don't want to end up like Bonnie & Clyde." This was just a year after Arthur Penn's film about those romantic Depression-era gangsters (was Warren Beatty not hot in that movie?) and only a couple months after Georgie Fame's   "Ballad of Bonnie & Clyde" hit the airwaves; of course that reference would jump out at me. This guy doesn't want to resort to a life of crime, even though so many in Kingston did. Or maybe he just doesn't want to end up riddled with bullets in a police shoot-out -- well, who could blame him?

What a downbeat song this could have been -- yet the tempo ticks along, that trippy melody bounces around the scale. It's as if the act of singing the song itself keeps him from despair. If I were a DJ, I'd play this song alongside Lee Dorsey's "Working in a Coal Mine" and Sam Cooke's "Chain Gang."  In 1968, what did I know about working long hours for no pay? To be honest, what do I know about it now?  But thanks to records like these, at least I have given it more than a passing thought.

WEDNESDAY SHUFFLE

My son told me yesterday that when he hears me say I like someone's music, he automatically assumes it's someone English. Hmmm -- am I that transparent? Let's consult the shuffle and see...

1. "When It Sings" / Elvis Costello
From North (2003)
If I'd still been listening to Elvis Costello in 2003 -- which I wasn't -- I too might have been baffled by this tender album of jazz-drenched ballads. But finding it retrospectively, after Elvis' marriage to Diana Krall, it all made perfect sense. And doesn't Elvis live in Vancouver now? Does he still qualify as English?

2. "The Things We Never Said" / Thea Gilmore
From Rules for Jokers (2002)
Ha! Thea isn't English; she's from Scotland. A wonderful singer-songwriter, by the way.

3. "London Look" / Herman's Hermits
From The London Look EP (1968)
Not only a song by an English band, a song about London from an English band -- I am not doing so well here. What's worse, the Hermits did this song exclusively for a promo EP, sponsored by Yardley Cosmetics (remember the cologne Oh! De London? I wore nothing else for a year.) The basic idea is to stuff in as many London place names as possible. Who cares? It's a delightful, delicious little track.

4. "Nervous on the Road (But Could Not Stay Home)"/ Brinsley Schwarz
From Nervous on the Road (1972)
Despite the affected country drawl on this romping picaresque number about a touring musician, Nick Lowe is English, it's true.

5. "Don't Be Ashamed of Your Age" / Jerry Lee Lewis and George Jones
From Last Man Standing (2006)
Aha! Nobody's more American than that old rockbilly devil Jerry Lee and the king of country music George Jones. Normally I hate duet albums; this odds-defying LP is the exception to the rule. Listen to these two sly old dogs twiddling through this Bob Wills chestnut.

6. "Saint Beneath the Paint" / Nick Lowe
From Radio Daze (1984)
Not just one but two Englishmen -- the aforementioned Nick Lowe and his sometime colleague Paul Carrack, on particularly juicy bootleg live album. This obscure track from Nick's obscure LP The Abominable Showman (for that title alone he ought to be hung) is greatly improved with harmonies by Paul and a little boogie-woogie piano.

7. "Fool for a Lonesome Train" / Ben Harper & the Innocent Criminals
From Life Line (2007)
Another American -- whew! -- singing a trumpery bit of country blues. I still haven't quite figured out the riddle that is Ben Harper, but I keep on trying -- that voice can make any song sound better than it should.

8. "Rivers of Babylon" / The Melodians
From The Harder They Come (1972)
Do Jamaicans count as English (being former colonials) or American (being in the same hemisphere)? Like most American kids my age, Jimmy Cliff's Jamaican gangster movie was my introduction to reggae, and I played it so often, it's still hard-wired in my memory. "And let the words of my mouth / and the meditations of my mind / be acceptable in your sight" -- I still sing this song under my breath whenever I hear that blessing in church.

9. "Queen of Sheba" / Nick Lowe
From Nick the Knife (1982)
Not this one again! (Like I mind.)

10. "Knapsack" / Amy Rigby
From Diary of a Mod Housewife (1994)
Well, at least we're ending with an American -- not only an American, but a country punk female (talk about defying cliches). Fantasizing about the guy who checks her bags at the bookstore -- I picture the old Shakespeare and Company on the Upper West Side -- that's enough to fuel this Mod housewife's daydreams for week.