Papa Was Too

The record

Joe Tex, born Joseph Arrington Jr. in 1935, recorded for Dial Records, the label his longtime producer Buddy Killen formed around him, with distribution by Atlantic. Killen remained Tex's producer for years, and 1966 was one of the singer's busiest years on the charts. “Papa Was Too” was released in 1966 with “The Truest Woman in the World” on the B-side. It reached number 15 on the Billboard R&B chart and number 44 on the pop chart, one of five Tex singles to enter the R&B top 40 that year. WhoSampled lists the song as drawing on Lowell Fulson's “Tramp”. The single runs 2:40.

The break

Producers have mostly taken the drums from “Papa Was Too” rather than its vocal or horns, and isolated drum loops from the record still circulate among beatmakers. Its appeal to breakbeat DJs lay partly in its age: it is a mid-1960s soul record that already has the drum-forward feel they looked for in later funk.

Into hip hop

“Papa Was Too” was included in the Ultimate Breaks and Beats series, compiled by Louis “BreakBeat Lou” Flores and Lenny “BreakBeat Lenny” Roberts for Street Beat Records between 1986 and 1991, and it is one of the oldest recordings in that series, which also collected records by James Brown, the J.B.'s and Kool & the Gang. The reissue put the record in front of producers who had never owned the original Dial 45. EPMD used it on “Jane”, the closing track of Strictly Business, released on June 7, 1988, and the first chapter of their long-running series of songs about the same character.

Legacy

On the West Coast, Freestyle Fellowship used it on “Sunshine Men” from To Whom It May Concern... (1991), and MC Ren used it on “Behind the Scenes”, the second track on his EP Kizz My Black Azz, released on June 30, 1992. Ren co-produced that track with DJ Bobcat. Later underground artists have also used it, including MF DOOM on “Absolutely” and Detroit rapper Guilty Simpson on “100 Styles”. WhoSampled also lists uses by Skyzoo, Rejjie Snow, the Bay Area's 187 Proof and Norman Cook's Beats International. Tex himself returned to the charts with “I Gotcha” in 1972. The song shows that the breakbeat canon reaches back beyond the funk era into mid-1960s soul.