I recently found these new (to me) performances of George Harrison’s timeless classic song, TaxMan, on YouTube.

The TRAVELING BEATLEBURYS:

The Japanese Beatles Tribute Band “The BeaTrips”

For ages, I have been collecting and posting different version’s of George Harrison’s classic and timeless TaxMan song.  During a CPE webinar today, one of the polling questions asked which musical artist hadn’t recorded a song called TaxMan; Elvis Presley, Lucky Dube or The Beatles. The answer was Elvis. 

The presenter explained that he had come across a song by South African reggae artist Lucky Dube.  This was news to me; so I searched YouTube and found a number of recordings of Lucky Dube performing this song. One of them even includes the lyrics. 

TAXMAN
(Composed by Lucky Dube)

I pay my gardener
To clean up my garden
I pay my doctor
To check out da other ting
I pay my lawyer
To fight for my rights
And I pay my body guard
To guard my body
There’s only one man I pay
But I don’t know what I’m paying for
I’m talking about the taxman x3

CHORUS

What have you done for me lately
Mr Taxman x4

You take from the rich
Take from the poor
You even take from me
Can’t understand it now
I pay for the police
To err…I don’t know why
‘Cause if my dollar was good enough
There wouldn’t be so much crime
In the Streets
They tell me you’re a fat man
And you always take and
Never give

CHORUS

What have you done for me lately
Mr Taxman

Till fade

I had never heard of Lucky Dube before now and was bummed out to read in this Wikipedia article, that he was killed by carjackers in 2007 in South Africa at the age of only 43.  As you can hear in these examples, he sounds a lot like Bob Marley, another reggae artist who died much too young, at 36.