There is some debate in the music industry as to which record came first, but the general consensus is that the first rap record was by the Fatback Band followed by what has been called the “granddaddy” of rap records, "Rapper's Delight."
Long before J. Cole, the popular rapper from Fayetteville whose verse is characterized by his flow of words, there was Bill Curtis and the Fatback Band.
Curtis, another Fayetteville native, gets credit from many authorities and source books for recording the first rap record of the hip-hop era.
The release of that song, “King Tim III (Personality Jock),” actually predated the Sugarhill Gang’s multi-platinum seller “Rapper’s Delight,” though the latter is often cited as the first commercially released rap song.
Both “King Tim III” and “Rapper’s Delight” emerged during 1979, within months of each other, at the dawn of hip-hop.
“It was a milestone,” Curtis said of his band’s historical hip-hop recording.
Curtis, a drummer and percussionist, founded the Fatback Band in the early 1970s and continues to lead the current incarnation of his funk/dance franchise.
Whereas “King Tim III” failed to cross over from any R&B activity into the mainstream, never cracking the Billboard Top 40, “Rapper’s Delight” became a worldwide smash.
“I was out then, but on the B-side (of a single). It was the first recorded rap,” Curtis said of “King Tim III.”
• • •
Short in stature, Curtis speaks in a stately, melodious voice that has a mellow groove of its own. During an interview from his longtime home off Country Club Drive, he sat comfortably on a brown leather couch in his stocking feet. He sipped a root-based beverage that he despises, yet drinks on a daily basis for his kidneys.
In the kitchen, Terri Everett, his partner for a quarter-century, was baking an experimental pound cake without milk.
More than once, Curtis called out, asking when the cake would be ready. In the meantime, she offered him a sample of what was to come with a crusty cupcake made from the same mix.
“I’m close to vegan,” he said. “I don’t eat that much meat. As you grow older, you learn to fall out of love for food.”
His love for music — especially, making music — has never waned.
Curtis estimates that his band’s music has been sampled 35 to 45 times over the years. In music, sampling is the reuse of a portion, or sample, of a sound recording in another recording. Samples may be rhythm, melody, speech, sounds or entire bars of music.
Two years ago, Curtis and his band’s stock rose again when soul diva Chaka Khan’s single “Like Sugar” gained widespread attention. The song heavily sampled the Fatback Band’s 1975 funk-jam, “(Are You Ready) Do the Bus Stop.”
“Chaka Khan did a remake of ‘Bus Stop,’ and that really opened up the doors again for me,” he said. “She took all the Fatback music from ‘Bus Stop,’ and she wrote some new lyrics to it. She called it sugar — ‘Like Sugar.’ And that really opened the doors. That opened up little avenues for me to tour, plus opened up some commercial and movie things.”
Curtis, an only child who moved back to Fayetteville around 1997 to live with his elderly mother, continues to make his own music. These days, he releases singles only on his Fatback Records label.
Born and raised on Ann Street near the First Presbyterian Church in Fayetteville, Curtis is the son of a model/beautician and shoemaker.
After starting with the piano, he switched to drums in 1943. Curtis joined the band at E.E. Smith High School, a program that produced a string of top-notch drummers during the middle of the century, with Curtis, Belton Evans, Herbert Drake and Ernest Moore at the top of the class.
All those stickmen would experience successful professional careers. Curtis credits the late Evans, who played behind some of the best in the early days of rock ’n’ roll, with teaching him to play the drums.
After serving a stint in the Army, Curtis studied percussion at the Mannes School of Music in New York and at the New York College of Music.
Why 3rd shift is the best?
Balancing work, sleep, and free time during the day is a benefit that 3rd shift workers enjoy. There also may be a big benefit for your family...
Join almost HALF A MILLION Happy Students Worldwide
Pianoforall is one of the most popular online piano courses online and has helped over 450,000 students around the world achieve their dream of playing beautiful piano for over a decade.
The party music may pay the bills, but he’s a classically trained musician.
Early on, Curtis played as a sideman and recorded with a number of accomplished R&B and jazz artists, including Paul Williams, Big Maybelle, Bill Doggett, Sil Austin, King Curtis, Dinah Washington and Clyde McPhatter of Drifters fame. That’s him on drums on McPhatter’s 1965 recording “Live at the Apollo Theater.”
More recently, the Fatback Band has been playing the African World Peace Festival every other year in his hometown, and the group remains a strong draw in Europe. On Feb. 29, the band — under the name Fatback Band New Generation — was flying to England for a tour that includes dates in Amsterdam, Germany and The Netherlands.
Fatback has been booked for three music festivals in the United Kingdom, according to Curtis. “We’re like a local band in England,” he said, adding that his group’s music is popular in Japan, too.
• • •
This first-class party band, always known to lock into a killer groove and work it to death, beat the Sugarhill Gang to the punch. Fatback was the first R&B act to acknowledge the populist form of rap art that first emerged from the streets of New York City more than four decades ago.
“I heard people rapping up in the Bronx,” the 88-year-old Curtis said late last month. “In New York, they had street parties in the boroughs. We played all around New York. I was playing up in the Bronx and I heard the DJs up there — I think it was Grandmaster (Flash, another early rap artist) — they rapping and scratching on records and all that. You see, the Bronx was the birthplace of rap.”
Around that same time, Curtis was in the studio recording the “Fatback XII” album. He said he had no intentions of recording a rap song, but once the album was finished, he failed to hear hit potential from any of the recorded tracks.
“That’s the way I go — on instinct, on feeling,” he said.
Curtis told his partner, Jerry Thomas, who has co-produced most of the Fatback Band catalog with him, that he didn’t think he had a possible hit on the disc.
“‘We’ve got to do something different in there.’ And I had this one tune in there,” Curtis said, “which was kind of like an instrumental called ‘Catch the Beat.’ I said, ‘Jerry, let’s do a rap.’
“First thing Jerry said, ‘Can’t nobody in the band rap. What do you mean, let’s do a rap?’ In the meantime,” Curtis added, “one of the roadies was in the studio with me and heard me say that. He said, ‘I have a friend that lives in the projects that can rap.’ I said, ‘Yeah, bring him in tomorrow night.’ And he brought in Timothy Washington. That’s his name. He brought Timothy in and I said, ‘Go in the studio and start rapping.’ And he went in there and laid it down in two shots. Bang! Then we changed his name to King Tim III.”
• • •
Hip-hop’s roots as a musical phenomenon are subject to debate, although its roots as a commercial phenomenon are considered much clearer.
There is some debate in the music industry as to which record came first, but the general consensus is that the first rap record was by the Fatback Band followed by what has been called the “granddaddy” of rap records, "Rapper's Delight."
It can be argued that rap on record had been around for years, with James Brown, Gil Scott-Heron and the Last Poets among those who recorded rhyme-like spoken word passages that have been likened to rap music at an earlier stage. Some music archivists even argue that such jazz scat artists as Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald and Al Jarreau were rapping on record years before the arrival of the hip-hop era.
Still, “King Tim III (Personality Jock)” — which first came out on the Spring Records label — marks the beginning of recorded hip-hop.
What keys are in G major?
The key of G major mostly uses the notes of the G major scale, which are G, A, B, C, D, E, and F♯. The key signature has one sharp, F♯, and its...
“‘King Tim’ remains a killer blast of hip-hop, seamlessly mixing a slick old-school rap into the band's intensely funky blend of organ, energetic horn blasts and a relentless walking bassline,” the online All Music Guide says in its review of “Fatback XII.”
Curtis always has claimed that his rap record came out roughly three weeks before “Rapper’s Delight.”
Yet, according to online sources, “King Tim III” was released March 25, 1979, months before “Rapper’s Delight” hit the streets on Sept. 16, 1979. Eventually, the Sugarhill Gang’s dance-groove track filled the airwaves and made the DJs’ rotation in the nation’s disco clubs.
"Rapper’s Delight,“ released on Sugar Hill Records, may not have been first, but it is credited for introducing hip-hop music to a wide audience. Likewise, it proved there was money to be made in hip-hop records.
Whereas the Sugarhill Gang’s song was far more successful — with the New Jersey-based hip-hop trio producing the first rap single to become a Top 40 hit (it reached No. 36 on Jan. 5, 1980) on the American Billboard Hot 100 — the Fatback Band’s first rap release was issued as a B-side, or the flip side, of the 7-inch single, “You’re My Candy Sweet.”
Curtis said he pushed for “King Tim III” to be the A-side of the single. But he was told that Spring Records refused to put up any money to market the song that label executives largely saw as a novelty, at most.
They didn’t think it would catch on with listeners.
“‘You’re My Candy Sweet’ was me on the vocal,” Curtis said, before adding with his infectious laugh, “and I can’t carry a tune.”
• • •
Closing in on his 90th birthday, Curtis said he’s considering backing off as a percussionist with Fatback and taking on more of a management role.
“I’m going to go until I drop,” he said with that high-pitched snicker of a laugh. “Our music — they’re just catching up to us. They’re just catching up to what we were doing. The DJs was raised on Fatback; the Djs was weened on Fatback.”
He figures approximately 50 albums have been issued under the Fatback or Fatback Band name. Those records were released on the labels Perception, Polygram, Spring and his own Fatback Records.
“It’s my life’s work and it tells me where I came from,” he said. “I didn’t do it by myself. I was surrounded by good people and people on the same page I was on.”
Following “King Tim III,” he said, Fatback recorded at least a couple more rap records. “After that,” Curtis said, “I got away from it. I had done rap. I try to tell people — don’t try to pigeonhole it. It’s just rap.”
“It’s not a big deal to me,” he replied, when asked if it bothers him that he doesn’t always receive proper credit for making the first-recorded hip-hop era rap song. “I’m a record man. I love to make music. I know what I did. I know what I did.”
Piano Guidance
Photo: Eric Esma
Promotion
Promotion
Promotion