Fisherman

Fisherman opens Heart of the Congos, and came out in Jamaica in 1977 as a single, Row Fisherman, on Perry's Upsetter label, with the Upsetters' Congo Dub on the other side. Myton remembered cutting a first version one evening with Boris Gardiner and Mikey "Boo" Richards, before Perry sent everyone home and recut it at the Black Ark the next day with Geoffrey Chung on bass and Paul Douglas on drums. He said that take, the one on the album, had a totally different feel.

The song paints the toil of the fishermen on whose catch hungry families depend. Plain or Pan heard thudding bass and scratchy guitar that Perry drowned in "a bathtub full of reverb and delay". The FADER called it the Congos' most famous song in 2012, when its melody was Ashanti Roy's ringtone.

Versions and live

Its dubs include Bring the Mackaback and Fisherman Dub, and in 2006 Blood and Fire gave its rhythm a whole album, Fisherman Style, with versions by Horace Andy, Gregory Isaacs and many more. It is the song the Congos play most often on setlist.fm, logged from the Dour Festival in 2006 to Malmö in October 2025, and it closed both of their Irish shows that month. A live take recorded on the Station to Station train journey across North America in 2013 was pressed on site at the Barbican in 2015, in an edition of 300.

All three uploads in the hypersongs web are the same studio recording from Heart of the Congos, one of them the VP Records digital release.