Israelites

By Desmond Dekker's own account, the song began on a walk through a park, eating popcorn, when he overheard a couple arguing about money. She needed more; he said his work did not pay enough. Dekker related to both of them, started humming a line about getting up in the morning and slaving for bread, and by the time he got home, he said, the song was finished. He wrote it with producer Leslie Kong, and it first appeared in Jamaica as "Poor Me Israelites". The title is usually linked to the Rastafarian belief in descent from the ancient Israelites. In the 1960s Rastafarians were widely shunned in Jamaica, and the song laments their situation: poverty, torn clothes and the temptation of crime. It was sung in thick Jamaican Patois that many listeners abroad could barely follow, which did not slow it down at all. Released in Britain in March 1969, it became the first reggae number one in the UK and also topped the charts in the Netherlands and West Germany. In June 1969 it peaked at number nine on the Billboard Hot 100, among the first Jamaican records to reach the American top ten, and a million sales worldwide were reported that month. Its lyrics were so famously hard to catch that a 1989 cassette advert built a whole joke around mishearing them. The song keeps resurfacing, most recently in HBO's Watchmen in 2019, still sounding like the moment Jamaican music stepped onto the world stage.