Song of the Day 2/4: Baby Huey & the Babysitters, “Hard Times”

Even without Demolition Donny’s pointless tariffs, prices aren’t going down anytime soon, by which I mean “ever.” Song of the Day is well-equipped for what’s coming, because as long as music has been recorded, people have been singing about hard times. Get used to it.

You might know this as a Curtis Mayfield song. He wrote it and included it on his underappreciated 1975 LP “There’s No Place Like America Today.” Four years earlier, though, he gave it to a singer he signed to his Curtom Records label, James Ramey. At 400 pounds, Ramey went by the nickname Baby Huey, after the ’50s cartoon character, and called the R&B band he fronted the Babysitters. They became a popular live act in Chicago in the mid-’60s, when they cut a few singles. At the end of the decade, influenced by Sly Stone, they moved in a more psychedelic-funk direction.

Mayfield was in the midst of recording the band’s first album, much of which he wrote, in 1970 when Ramey died of a drug-related heart attack at age 26. Mayfield finished producing “The Baby Huey Story: The Living Legend” and released it the next year. It made no waves at the time, but rose in stature once it was recognized as a touchstone in the development of rap. Huey used to ad-lib lyrics, often self-congratulatory, over the band’s jams, and several of the its tracks, including “Hard Times,” have been sampled by dozens of rappers.