OUTTA COUNTY Vol. 10 No. 32 April 15 - 21, 2005 Honour Your Father Desmond Dekker: Rude boys like a nice boy by CHRIS ZIEGLER Blowtorch singer Desmond Dekker came one nice guy away from spending his life as a welder. After his habit of singing while he blowtorched won his co-welders encouragement, Dekker figured hed give a real musical career a shot. But one of reggaes biggest and best-known stars was told to keep on walking after auditions at Coxsone Dodds standard-setting Studio One and Duke Reids Treasure Island (on the way to becoming the just-as-standard-setting Trojan Records). Good thing there was one more guy releasing reggae records back in 1961, and at Leslie Kongs Beverley Records studio, current label star Derrick Morgan listened to Dekkerthen going by his original and clunkier name Dacresand made the decision that would color the rest of reggae history. Maybe Morgan sawwell, heardsomething of himself in Dekker, whose soon-to-be-famous doo-wop falsetto shared Morgans own slow, soulful delivery because it was Morgans confidence that persuaded Beverley owner/producer Leslie Kong to keep young Dekker around. Of course, they made him wait two years to recordtedious, sure, but a nice thing to do for a kid in an industry in which an early flop could truncate an entire careerand in 1963, Kong finally decided Dekker had developed enough as a songwriter. Honour Your Mother and Father, which wound Dekkers distinctive lilt through aw-what-a-nice-boy lyrics and a perky reggae shufflehad modest success and marked the real beginning of a career that would lead this Kingston-born kid through Jamaicas armed and vicious rude-boy gangs and later to Englands trendier punk rockers, detouring even to a few releases alongside the Damned and Elvis Costello on Stiff Records in the early 1980s, on his way to worldwide-ish fame. | |
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