Stop That Train (The Spanishtonians song)

Last updated February 25, 2019

"Stop That Train" is a 1965 ska song by Jamaican band The Spanishtonians (also known as the Spanish Town Skabeats), that has been covered and sampled by numerous artists. Its most famous cover was its first, a 1967 cover by Keith & Tex. That rendition was in turn sampled by various artists, including Scotty, the Beastie Boys and Vanilla Ice. The song has also been covered by Clint Eastwood & General Saint and Don Campbell.

Ska is a music genre that originated in Jamaica in the late 1950s and was the precursor to rocksteady and reggae. It combined elements of Caribbean mento and calypso with American jazz and rhythm and blues. Ska is characterized by a walking bass line accented with rhythms on the off beat. It was developed in Jamaica in the 1960s when Prince Buster, Clement "Coxsone" Dodd, and Duke Reid formed sound systems to play American rhythm and blues and then began recording their own songs. In the early 1960s, ska was the dominant music genre of Jamaica and was popular with British mods. Later it became popular with many skinheads.

Jamaica is an island country situated in the Caribbean Sea. Spanning 10,990 square kilometres (4,240 sq mi) in area, it is the third-largest island of the Greater Antilles and the fourth-largest island country in the Caribbean. Jamaica lies about 145 kilometres (90 mi) south of Cuba, and 191 kilometres (119 mi) west of Hispaniola.

Keith & Tex are the Jamaican rocksteady duo of Keith Rowe and Phillip Texas Dixon, best known for their 1967 hit "Stop That Train".

Lyrics

The original version of "Stop That Train" is sung from the point of view of a woman whose boyfriend is leaving by train for a long absence. She yells at the conductor, apparently in vain, to "stop that train", because she wants to join him on board.

Keith & Tex version

Jamaican duo Keith & Tex covered the song in 1967, in their signature rocksteady style. Their version flipped the song's genders, changing the lyrics from "my baby he is leaving" to "my baby she is leaving". The song became Keith & Tex's biggest hit.

Rocksteady is a music genre that originated in Jamaica around 1966. A successor of ska and a precursor to reggae, rocksteady was the dominant style of music in Jamaica for nearly two years, performed by many of the artists who helped establish reggae. For example harmony groups such as The Techniques, The Righteous Flames and The Gaylads; singers such as Delroy Wilson, Phyllis Dillon and Roy Shirley; musicians such as Jackie Mittoo, Tommy McCook and Lynn Taitt. The term rocksteady comes from a popular (slower) dance style mentioned in the Alton Ellis song 'Rocksteady' that matched the new sound. Some rocksteady songs became hits outside Jamaica, as with ska, helping to secure the international base reggae music has today.

Samples

Several dub versions of the song were recorded, which sampled the Keith & Tex version. The most notable was "Draw Your Brakes" by Scotty, which appeared on the classic soundtrack album to the 1972 film The Harder They Come . Another dub version was the 1972 "Cool Breeze" by Big Youth. [1]

Dub is a genre of music that grew out of reggae in the 1960s, and is commonly considered a subgenre, though it has developed to extend beyond the scope of reggae. Music in this genre consists predominantly of instrumental remixes of existing recordings and is achieved by significantly manipulating and reshaping the recordings, usually by removing the vocals from an existing music piece, and emphasizing the drum and bass parts. Other techniques include dynamically adding extensive echo, reverb, panoramic delay, and occasional dubbing of vocal or instrumental snippets from the original version or other works. It was an early form of popular electronic music. The Roland Space Echo was widely used by dub producers in the 1970s to produce echo and delay effects.

<i>The Harder They Come</i> (soundtrack) album

The Harder They Come is the soundtrack album to the film of the same name, released in 1972 in the United Kingdom as Island Records ILPS 9202. It was issued in February 1973 in North America as Mango Records SMAS-7400. It peaked at #140 on the Billboard 200.

Manley Augustus Buchanan, better known as Big Youth, is a Jamaican deejay, mostly known for his work during the 1970s.

The Keith & Tex version was also sampled by the Beastie Boys, on the section called "Stop That Train" from their 1989 song B-Boy Bouillabaisse.

The Beastie Boys were an American hip hop group from New York City formed in 1981. The group comprised Michael "Mike D" Diamond, Adam "MCA" Yauch and Adam "Ad-Rock" Horovitz.

It was also sampled by rapper Vanilla Ice, in a 1991 single also entitled "Stop That Train".

Robert Matthew Van Winkle, known professionally as Vanilla Ice, is an American rapper, actor, and television host. Born in South Dallas, and raised in Texas and South Florida, Ice released his debut album, Hooked, in 1989 on Ichiban Records, before signing a contract with SBK Records, a record label of the EMI Group, which released a reformatted version of the album in 1990 under the title To the Extreme, which contained Ice's best-known hits: "Ice Ice Baby" and a cover of "Play That Funky Music". "Ice Ice Baby" was the first hip hop single to top the Billboard charts.

Other covers

The Jamaican reggae duo Clint Eastwood & General Saint recorded a cover version of "Stop That Train", which was released as a single in 1983, and was the title track of their 1983 album Stop That Train. Their version replaced the original song's verses with an interpolation of the folk song 500 Miles, as well as the lyrics "Hey mister postman, bring back my woman".

Reggae is a music genre that originated in Jamaica in the late 1960s. The term also denotes the modern popular music of Jamaica and its diaspora. A 1968 single by Toots and the Maytals, "Do the Reggay" was the first popular song to use the word "reggae," effectively naming the genre and introducing it to a global audience. While sometimes used in a broad sense to refer to most types of popular Jamaican dance music, the term reggae more properly denotes a particular music style that was strongly influenced by traditional mento as well as American jazz and rhythm and blues, especially the New Orleans R&B practiced by Fats Domino and Allen Toussaint, and evolved out of the earlier genres ska and rocksteady. Reggae usually relates news, social gossip, and political comment. Reggae spread into a commercialized jazz field, being known first as ‘Rudie Blues’, then ‘Ska’, later ‘Blue Beat’, and ‘Rock Steady’. It is instantly recognizable from the counterpoint between the bass and drum downbeat, and the offbeat rhythm section. The immediate origins of reggae were in ska and rocksteady; from the latter, reggae took over the use of the bass as a percussion instrument.

Clint Eastwood & General Saint were a reggae deejay duo of the early 1980s, consisting of Clint Eastwood and General Saint.

"500 Miles" is a song made popular in the United States and Europe during the 1960s folk revival. The simple repetitive lyrics offer a lament by a traveller who is far from home, out of money and too ashamed to return.

British reggae singer Don Campbell, along with General Saint, recorded a cover version of Stop That Train in 1994, as "Saint & Campbell". Their version had a house music influence, and replaced the original song's verses with new lyrics sung in a toasting style.

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"Stop That Train" may refer to:

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References

↑ Stop That Train: Updated, Dub Nerd, July 30, 2008

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[1] Stop That Train: Updated, Dub Nerd, July 30, 2008