Song of the Week: Baby Huey & The Babysitters – “Hard Times”
This week we’re going way back. No really. I mean way back to 1970. This week I wanted to do something different and feature a song that has been sampled numerous times in Hip-Hop. “Hard Times” by Baby Huey & the Babysitters. I re-discovered this song while watching the opening sequence of JCVD (Dope movie by the way). The song is just made to be sampled and is dope just by itself. Some of the rappers who have sampled this particular song: Ice Cube (“The Birth”off Death Certificate), A Tribe Called Quest (“Can I Kick It?”off People’s Instinctive Travels & The Paths of Rhythm), Ghostface Killah (“Buck 50″of Supreme Clientele), and most recently Swizz Beatz (“School Of Hard Knocks”).
Baby Huey & the Babysitters worked with such artists like Donny Hathaway & Curtis Mayfield. I wish I could say that Baby Huey (Real name James Ramey) lived to make more classic music like this but he and the Babysitter only released one album (Well, one that you can find). Huey had problems with drugs as well as a weight problem and died at the age of 26 by way of a heart attack.
Check out the song and tell us what you think.
Good pick Easy! This is a great song from Baby Huey (representing Chi-City), the whole album is a good listen actually. Swizz did a nice job sampling this song for “School Of Hard Knocks”. I like these editions of “Song of the Week” where you’re diggin’ in the crates, gotta have more like this in the future.
Baby Huey had a nappyafro!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Album_cover_james_ramey.jpg
good pick
Thanks to guys like you, I don’t have to bang my head on a wall trying to find out where the original to this highly sampled song came from. I was only aware of the Curtis Mayfield version, but the groove wasn’t the same, and now I have my answer. Big thanks, and much love!