Jimmy Castor - The Story From The Roots - 1973(2009)Paul Winley - Rare Soul

James Walter Castor was born on Jan. 23, 1940, in Manhattan. (His son said that for years he had let others assume he was far younger than he was, by as much as seven years.)songwriter,singer,saxophonist,percussionist.Producer,arranger,humorist…alias The E-Man,has earned his well-deserved reputation as “THE EVERYTHING MAN.”Castor grew up in Harlem and Washington Heights with the legendary rock ’n’ roll singer Frankie Lymon. Possessing a pure, high voice like Lymon’s, Jimmy often filled in for him when Lymon couldn’t make a performance with his group, the Teenagers. Castor soon started his own group, Jimmy and the Juniors, and wrote the first song it recorded, “I Promise to Remember.”  Lymon and the Teenagers made it a Top 10 rhythm-and-blues hit for themselves in the summer of 1956.By the 1960s, Castor, had gained recognition for his version of the Latin soul sound that emerged as Puerto Ricans joined blacks in Upper Manhattan. In 1966 he had a hit on Smash Records, “Hey Leroy, Your Mama’s Callin’ You.” The melody was calypso-inflected, the groove was Latin and the liner notes were bilingual. With another band, the Jimmy Castor Bunch, he moved on to funk, combining a big beat with spirited storytelling on records like “Troglodyte (Cave Man)” on RCA, which hit No. 6 on the pop charts in 1972 and sold a million copies. Another hit was “The Bertha Butt Boogie” in late 1974.Castor’s greatest influence may have come with the advent of hip-hop music and culture, when disc jockeys began using snippets of his earlier funk hits. In the 1983 movie “Flashdance” a sample of “It’s Just Begun,” the title track of his first album, was used in the break-dance “battle” scene. His work has been sampled numerous times by hip-hop artists like Kanye West, Ice Cube and Mos Def.Richard Colon, who is professionally known as Crazy Legs and who is president of the Rock Steady Crew, a premier break-dance group that used Mr. Castor’s songs, said of Mr. Castor in an interview, “People have been impacted by him and don’t even know it.”  Jimmy recorded for Atlantic,RCA and a few smaller labels..16 albums in total i know of.He passed in 2012 aged 71 from heart failure.But the great mans legacy lives on through his legendary albums.  This particular album features a few tracks that were very popular on the Northern scene here in the UK.,,not a dude to be heard!

AMM

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