»Desmond Dekker
The New York Times report that Desmond Dekker, the "King of Blue Beat", the "King of Ska" died. Through his song "007 (Shanty Town)" I first heard of the rude-boy culture of cool which held me obsessed through my college years. Somewhere I have a black-and-white photograph of myself with Desmond Dekker, backstage at The Metro or The Aragorn in Chicago.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Jamaican reggae pioneer Desmond Dekker, famed for the genre's first worldwide hit with ''Israelites,'' has died of a heart attack at his home in England, the Jamaica Observer reported on Friday. He was 64.
Dekker, born Desmond Dacres in the Jamaican capital of Kingston on July 16, 1941, was raised on a diet of such 1950s crooners as Nat ``King'' Cole and Jackie Wilson.
After working initially as a welder, alongside Marley, he began composing songs. He signed with Chinese-Jamaican music label owner Leslie Kong, and scored an immediate hit in 1963 with ``Honor Your Mother and Father.''first taste of success in Britain with ``0.0.7. (Shanty Town),'' which was inspired by student riots in Jamaica. It eventually peaked at No. 14 on the U.K. charts, and was featured on the soundtrack of the 1972 film ``The Harder They Come.''
In 1969, he enjoyed his biggest success with the propulsive reggae classic ``Israelites,'' four years before Marley truly brought reggae into the mainstream. The song's hard-luck lyrics -- ``Get up in the morning, slaving for bread, sir'' -- delivered in Dekker's mellifluous voice, resonated around the world. It topped the charts in the U.K. and many other countries, and reached the top 10 in the United States.
``It's about how hard things were for a lot of people in Jamaica -- downtrodden, like the Israelites that led Moses to the Promised Land,'' Dekker said in the liner notes for the 2005 career retrospective ``You Can Get It If You Really Want.''
``I was really saying, don't give up, things will get better if you just hold out long enough.''
Many of Dekker's hits, including ``Rude Boy Train,'' were about rude culture, which grew out of the Jamaica slums in the early 1960s. The term ``rude,'' as in ``rude boy,'' referred to someone who was cool or hip.
Dekker also enjoyed a U.K. hit in 1970 with a cover of Jimmy Cliff's ``You Can Get It If You Really Want,'' which he recorded only at the behest of Kong. He settled in England about this time, but his chart success was largely over.
