Jay-Z's first charting single was built on a record by a band nobody remembers

Jay-Z's first charting single was built on a record made in Atlanta in 1976 by a band from Richmond that most people have never heard of.

Foxy Brown was seventeen at the time, Big Jaz on the beat, and he lifted it almost whole from Seven Minutes of Funk, a seven minute instrumental buried on side one of this album.

That bassline is the entire record. It's the thing Grandmaster Flash had already built Super Rappin' No. 2 around back in 1979, which makes it one of the load bearing walls of early hip hop before Jay-Z ever touched it. Wu-Tang used it. Biggie used it. Lil' Kim, Method Man, EPMD, more than fifty songs by most counts.

The band is the part that gets me. The Whole Darn Family were thirteen people out of Richmond, Virginia, a six piece horn section included, led by drummer and singer Tyrone Thomas, managed and produced by a man named August Moon who ran his label out of a storefront on Richmond's Southside.

They went down to the Sound Pit in Atlanta and cut this thing. Look at the cover. Matching t-shirts, borrowed vintage car, big grins, and the title in huge red letters announcing that they have, at last, arrived.

They made this one album and never made another.

When the sample money eventually came, it went to the two men whose names were on the composition, Moon and Thomas, which is just how songwriting credit works, and it means the horn players and everyone else who put this on tape are on no paperwork anywhere.

There's no scandal in that. It's just the ordinary quiet arithmetic of a business where the people in the room and the people on the contract are rarely the same list.

Thirteen people drove to Atlanta believing this was the beginning. It turned out to be the only one. And then that bassline went out and lived a fifty year life none of them could have imagined in that parking lot.