Story Behind the Song...

Way back in the year 1982 my first bandleader, Wesley Ford and I were sitting around talking about the late 60's when we were out gigging around Washington DC. I was a teenager. The group, The DC Playboys, had long since disbanded by that time and we hadn't seen each other in a good while. Rap music was just beginning to catch on and somehow the conversation shifted to how a lot of negative influences were starting to creep into the lyrics of the songs. Wesley knew I liked to write so he suggested that I should write something positive. Having already introduced me to what he called the " I AM " philosophy, which he had printed pamphlets about, Wesley encouraged me to use it as the theme for a rap song. That's how the whole thing started.

Little did I suspect at the time, all the changes I would go through to arrive at the present incarnation of this work in progress. My own kids, who were 6 and 11 at the time, are among the voices in the background. They are 32 and 37 today and we all get a big laugh out of listening to the track. My buddy Tyrone Anderson and his friend Judy Seeger gathered up her kids, nieces and nephews and they all ate peanut butter sandwiches in the back of my van on the way to the studio. Douglas Graham aka Mr.D, put up his hard earned money for us to record.

Six years later in February of 1988 I went back in the studio with James (Man) and Forrest who were among the kids on the original recording. We made another demo with them doing the lead rap instead of me. They were about 4 or 5 years old at the original session and 10 and 11 when we did the second recording session. Remember on this one, they are rapping to their own background, recorded six years earlier. Today, of course, they are grown men with kids of their own most likely. Maybe when I catch up with them their kids can be overdubbed as well.

This brings us to the present (2007) when I decided to update the music to the song. First I went back to the studio with the old master tape ( frazzled edges and all ) and took the kids voices off and put them on a CD by themselves ( CD's hadn’t reached the market yet when we first started this project). Next, thanks to today’s state of the art technology, I was able to add the old voices to the new track and sync the rhythm by using my son's home pro-tools setup. Pro-tools is a computer based recording system that has editing capabilities that would have been impossible with the analog tape we started with.

Now comes the amazing part. I was then able to overdub my four grandchildren so that now they are on the same track with their parents when their parents were kids. Actually my grandson is older than his father was when we first recorded almost 25 years ago. So now we have three generations on the track and who knows maybe more will be added in the future.