Desmond Dekker has passed.
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.”
Amen.