Samples That Taught Me Something: Little Beaver
The guitarist behind so many samples you love
If you’ll allow me, let’s start at the end, with a criminally underrated Jay-Z song, and no further context. Then we’ll work out how we got there:
“Little Beaver”
In an excerpt from Robert Christgau’s guide to rock albums of the 70’s he gives a backhanded compliment to Willie “Little Beaver” Hale:
"The great T.K. guitarist has a problem when he sings, which is that he can't. Ruined last year's blues album, but somehow it doesn't get in the way of this dance-groove item. The lyrics sound as if they were made up on the spot by somebody with a lot of common sense, and Beaver talks that talk as he goes about his work, which is seeing to the aforementioned groove."
But Little Beaver, who got his nickname from his prominent front teeth, never wanted to be a singer. In a rare interview with Long Play Miami that is now scrubbed from the internet, he compares his experience to that of Nat King Cole. He tells a story about Cole and how he never wanted to be a singer. At one of his standard club gigs, some “gangster guys” came in asking to hear “One For My Baby (And One More For The Road)”. The lead singer was gone and the club owner told Cole to sing or pack up and go.
Beaver didn’t want to sing either, but his bandleader forced his hand early in his career. The pay was too good to say no and risk being replaced.
So we’ll ignore the complaints about his vocals and focus on the groove that Christgau was talking about. The first time I was pulled in by a Little Beaver groove I had no idea it was him playing. I was a teenager hearing the 1993 remix of Mary J Blige’s “Real Love” with Biggie on a throwback radio station. It wasn’t a song that I kept loaded on my iPod nano but that drunk, bouncy little melody was sticky enough that when I sat down to listen to Chance The Rapper’s Acid Rap mixtape, it felt immediately familiar.
The guitar line that Chance squawks over on “Favorite Song” is Betty Wright’s 1971 hit “Clean Up Woman”, an infectious song that warns listeners that their ex might start to date other people at some point. Little Beaver played the guitar line.
We have to take a moment to appreciate a guitar line that generated multiple enduring hit songs (plus a more subtle sample used in SWV’s “I’m So Into You”). There’s something special in that five chord sequence. That’s what led me deep down a rabbit hole and when I came out I was watching Dance Papi (a wonderful YouTuber) explain how to use the son clave in a 45 minute video. He plays the classic 5 stroke clave rhythm, and it all makes sense. Little Beaver was probably, consciously or unconsciously, mimicking that afro-latin rhythm on “Clean Up Woman”.
It’s an undercurrent in a lot of soul from Florida that we don’t tend to acknowledge. It doesn’t seem like there is even a wide awareness of how much of the soul music we love came from southern Florida. We’ve got KC and the Sunshine Band, George McCrae, Gwen McCrae, Latimore, T-Connection, Sam Moore (of Sam & Dave), Betty Wright, and of course, Little Beaver.
To confirm my suspicions, we return to the album that Christgau was talking about in his open-faced compliment sandwich, Party Down.
Party Down was Beaver’s third album, released in 1974 after an early career as a session musician. It was also his most cohesive and commercially successful album and original copies of the LP sell for upwards of $100.
The album opens with a groove so good they recorded it twice with part 1 and part 2 of “Party Down”. We get a brief mid-tempo diversion with Money Vibrations and then on track 4 they bring back “Party Down” in a fake mustache and sunglasses and call it “Get Into The Party Life”. It’s clearly the centerpiece of the album, and it’s the sleepiest party song ever written. There’s something enchanting about it.
It’s also the riff that was sampled on that Jay-Z song we started with.
Little Beaver told the Miami New Times that there were three main ingredients to the cocktail that became “Party Down”:
“a white group” he heard one time that played with wild chord changes
a “Caribbean commercial” that went “bam bam bum boom”
Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On”
Later in the interview he confirms my son clave theory: “So when it came to "Party Down," that's what I was thinking. The Latin flavor. That was something I picked up on in Miami, I guess just listening to the Latin music. It has that African in it, so it was already in me. But when I hear it, it inspires me.”
There were two legendary keyboardists on the album, Latimore and Timmy Thomas, and it was Latimore who laid the subtle groundwork on “Party Down”. Chocolate Perry took on the bass line. Perry played on every track on the album except “I Can Dig It” which featured the legendary Jaco Pastorius (also from Florida).
Party Down reached number 2 on the Billboard R&B charts in 1974. He released five albums in total but never had that level of success again. His music had more in common with Sly and the Family Stone’s psychedelic soul than the disco that was ruling the charts by the late 70s. By the time Beaver perfected his disco/boogie formula (and he really really did… no seriously click that link), it was 1980 and the racism and xenophobia of the disco demolition had already swept the genre from radio and charts.
After TK Records disintegrated in the early 1980s, Beaver got a job with Miami-Dade Transit and worked there for 30 years. When that interviewer for Long Play Miami went to his home in Opa-locka, Florida, Beaver had to wipe the dust away from his guitar to play him an old lick.
Beaver found out about the Jay-Z sample of his song “Get Into The Party Life” after reading through his own wikipedia page. Jacob Katel of the New Times wrote that Beaver was paid $60,000 for the sample.