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. That’s him on drums on McPhatter’s 1965 recording “Live at the Apollo Theater.” The party music may pay the bills, but he’s a classically trained musician.Įarly 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. 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.Īfter 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.
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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.Īll those stickmen would experience successful professional careers.
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These days, he releases singles only on his Fatback Records label.īorn and raised on Ann Street near the First Presbyterian Church in Fayetteville, Curtis is the son of a model/beautician and shoemaker.Īfter starting with the piano, he switched to drums in 1943.
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That opened up little avenues for me to tour, plus opened up some commercial and movie things.”Ĭurtis, an only child who moved back to Fayetteville around 1997 to live with his elderly mother, continues to make his own music.
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She called it sugar - ‘Like Sugar.’ And that really opened the doors. “She took all the Fatback music from ‘Bus Stop,’ and she wrote some new lyrics to it. “Chaka Khan did a remake of ‘Bus Stop,’ and that really opened up the doors again for me,” he said. The song heavily sampled the Fatback Band’s 1975 funk-jam, “(Are You Ready) Do the Bus Stop.” Two years ago, Curtis and his band’s stock rose again when soul diva Chaka Khan’s single “Like Sugar” gained widespread attention. Samples may be rhythm, melody, speech, sounds or entire bars of music. In music, sampling is the reuse of a portion, or sample, of a sound recording in another recording. His love for music - especially, making music - has never waned.īased out of New York City, the Fatback Band started as a jazz-funk outfit before finding most of its success in the ’70s and ’80s with a string of rhythm-and-blues hits like “(Do The) Spanish Hustle”, “I Like Girls,” “Gotta Get My Hands on Some (Money),” “Backstrokin' ” and “I Found Lovin.”Ĭurtis estimates that his band’s music has been sampled 35 to 45 times over the years. As you grow older, you learn to fall out of love for food.” In the meantime, she offered him a sample of what was to come with a crusty cupcake made from the same mix. More than once, Curtis called out, asking when the cake would be ready. In the kitchen, Terri Everett, his partner for a quarter-century, was baking an experimental pound cake without milk. He sipped a root-based beverage that he despises, yet drinks on a daily basis for his kidneys. During an interview from his longtime home off Country Club Drive, he sat comfortably on a brown leather couch in his stocking feet. Short in stature, Curtis speaks in a stately, melodious voice that has a mellow groove of its own. It was the first recorded rap,” Curtis said of “King Tim III.” “I was out then, but on the B-side (of a single).
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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. “It was a milestone,” Curtis said of his band’s historical hip-hop recording.Ĭurtis, a drummer and percussionist, founded the Fatback Band in the early 1970s and continues to lead the current incarnation of his funk/dance franchise. 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.īoth “King Tim III” and “Rapper’s Delight” emerged during 1979, within months of each other, at the dawn of hip-hop. Cole, the popular rapper from Fayetteville whose verse is characterized by his flow of words, there was Bill Curtis and the Fatback Band.Ĭurtis, another Fayetteville native, gets credit from many authorities and source books for recording the first rap record of the hip-hop era.