Rivers of Babylon

In the summer of 1978, if you were anywhere in Western Europe with a radio, you heard it. A pulsing disco bassline, a woman's voice riding above it, and then the words - old words, older than anyone in the charts, older than the recording studio and the vinyl and the discotheque and the whole bright machinery of pop - words about sitting by a river and weeping because home was somewhere else and someone was asking you to sing. "By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea we wept, when we remembered Zion." The year was 1978. The words were from roughly 586 BCE. And the song was number one for five weeks.

This is the story of how that happened. It is a story about the longest chain of borrowing in pop music - from a Hebrew psalm to a Rastafarian prayer to a German disco producer to the turntable - and how, at every link in the chain, the people doing the borrowing understood exactly what they were carrying.

The original weeping

Psalm 137 is the psalm you turn to if you want to understand what the Babylonian exile actually felt like - not as theology, not as history, but as a human experience of loss. The Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem and the Temple in 586 BCE and carried much of the population eastward. And then, apparently, they asked their captives to sing.

"They that carried us away captive required of us a song," the psalm says. "And they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying: Sing us one of the songs of Zion." The answer the psalm gives is both a refusal and a lament: "How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?" The opening verses - sitting by the rivers, weeping, hanging up the harps - have the quality of a memory so sharp it's been polished by repetition. Someone sat down very soon after the event and wrote what it felt like, and the words have never been improved upon.

The psalm has eight verses. The first four are the ones the song uses. The next two - verses five and six - are the ones the song doesn't. They're the vow of remembrance: "If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth." Those verses would have fit the song. They did not make it into the song. We'll come back to that.

The Jamaican detour - and why it matters

Jump two and a half thousand years. In 1970, a Jamaican reggae group called the Melodians released a song built on Psalm 137. Brent Dowe and Trevor McNaughton had adapted the psalm to a new reggae style deliberately, because they wanted to carry Rastafarian ideas about liberation and exile to a wider audience. For Rastafarians, Babylon is any oppressive system - police, colonial power, the whole apparatus of the society that holds you down - and the longing to return to Zion is the longing for freedom. The tribe's exile and the Jamaican experience of diaspora and oppression were, for them, the same story. They weren't wrong.

The Melodians' version changed some of the wording. "The Lord" became "King Alpha" and "Far-I" - Rastafarian titles for Haile Selassie, whose pre-coronation name was Ras Tafari. The "they" who demanded a song became "the wicked". And the song added a line from Psalm 19:14 - "Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in Thy sight" - which became a refrain. The borrowing was theological, intentional, and precise. The Melodians knew exactly which psalm they were in.

The Jamaican government briefly banned the song because its Rastafarian references were considered subversive. The producer, Leslie Kong, pointed out that the lyrics were taken almost entirely from the Bible - the same Bible that Jamaican Christians had been singing from "since time immemorial". The government lifted the ban. Three weeks later the song was number one in Jamaica. In 1972 it appeared on the soundtrack of The Harder They Come, the film credited with bringing reggae to the world. It is at this point that a German disco producer called Frank Farian heard it.

The disco floor

Boney M. were a Germany-based group assembled by the producer Frank Farian. Their cover of the Melodians' song stripped out the Rastafarian theology. "King Alpha" and "Far-I" became "the Lord", as in the original King James Bible. The line that had been "How can we sing King Alpha's song in a strange land" returned to "the Lord's song". And "O Far-I" - which didn't scan in the new arrangement - became "here tonight", which isn't biblical but is very disco.

The song was released in April 1978. By May it was number one in the UK, where it would stay for five weeks. It reached number one in Australia, Germany, France, Ireland, the Netherlands, Norway, New Zealand, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and about a dozen other countries. It did not reach number one in the United States, where it peaked at 30 on the Hot 100 - the Americans, apparently, were not ready for a psalm on the disco floor. It sold over two million copies in the UK alone, making it one of only seven singles in British chart history to cross that threshold.

What Boney M's version does not include - and this is the thing worth sitting with - is "If I forget thee, O Jerusalem." That's Psalm 137, verse five. The song uses verses one through four and then adds the Psalm 19:14 refrain. It stops exactly before the vow of remembrance, the verse that has been said at Jewish weddings for centuries, the verse about what happens to the hand that forgets. The summer hit was the grief. The vow didn't make the single. Whether that was a musical decision or a political one isn't recorded. The words were there. They didn't use them.

What the chain actually shows

It is a chain with three links, and each is worth holding. The Melodians took a Hebrew psalm and heard in it their own people's experience of captivity and longing - the Rastafarian identification with the tribes of Israel is theological and sincere, not merely metaphorical. Boney M. took the Melodians' version and carried it to an audience that had no particular relationship with either Rastafarianism or the Hebrew Bible, and that audience - the whole of Western Europe, apparently, plus Australia and South Africa and New Zealand and Mexico - found something in it worth buying.

What they found was the feeling in the first four verses: the sitting down, the weeping, the harp hung on a tree because you can't sing the home songs far from home. That feeling doesn't belong to one people. The Rastafarians knew that. Boney M. knew it. The summer crowds knew it, even if they couldn't have told you which psalm they were humming.

But the words were still specific. Still about Zion. Still about the rivers of a particular exile in a particular century. The tribe's saddest song became everyone's summer hit, and in the same breath it was still exactly what it had always been: a 2,600-year-old earworm about going home. The chain doesn't announce itself. It just keeps going.