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Woudy Hughes is still doing what he loves. (Photo by Jay Paul)
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“The Whole Darn Family Has Arrived” was released in 1976 and featured “Seven Minutes of Funk.” From left to right: Odis Hamlin, Woudy Hughes, Clifton Smith, Tommy Bryant, Tyrone “Little Tommy” Thomas, Girard “Giz” Bowe and Joel Smither.
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Mr. Wiggles, now known as August Moon. (Photo courtesy August Moon)
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Tyrone Thomas, aka Little Tommy, in the 1970s. (Photo courtesy: Alive NaturalSound Records)
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Woudy Hughes (center) with Jay Z (left) and Def Jam founder Russell Simmons. (Photo courtesy: Woudy Hughes)
Woudy Hughes reaches for the black bass guitar resting on an amplifier next to his sofa. “The first group I heard that sampled me was EPMD,” he says. “I was coming home one night, had the radio on and heard “Dun-Dun-Dun …” It was my bass. I thought, ‘Wow, I’m going to get paid for this.’ ”
Hughes was once the bassist for an interracial seven-piece Richmond funk band called the Whole Darn Family. Nearly 40 years ago, the group recorded “Seven Minutes of Funk,” an instrumental that has helped to mold the template for modern rap and hip-hop music. “It was originally called “Funk Jam in C,” Hughes says, turning on the amp. “Little Tommy [Tyrone Thomas] was the bandleader. One day, Tommy said, ‘Give me something like “Skin Tight” by the Ohio Players.’ ” He launches into the “Skin Tight” bass line, then plays the “Seven Minutes of Funk” progression. You can hear how the notes are joggled around.
Hughes’ groove has made it into popular songs by Jay Z, Public Enemy, the Wu-Tang Clan, Coolio, Redman, Gravediggaz, Alkaholiks, Faith Evans, Dru Down, Jodeci and, yes, EPMD’s “It’s My Thing” in 1987. It has been appropriated since the very start of modern hip-hop — Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five used it on 1979’s “Superappin’.”
Formerly known as Waverly Hughes — his changed first name is pronounced “Woo-dee” — he grew up in Richmond’s Fulton Bottom neighborhood, and met Tyrone Thomas in 1973. “I was in high school and he asked if I would go with him and The Creations, a vocal group, out to Oklahoma City. I still had two, three weeks to go in school, but I said, ‘I’m going.’” In Richmond soul circles, Thomas was the man, Hughes says. “Everybody had heard of Little Tommy. I’d see him playing with different people. ... When we got back, he said ‘Let’s start a band.’ ”
Hughes found guitarist Tommy Bryant playing a Gretsch guitar in a foosball parlor, and horn players Joel Smither and Sam Dwyer were refugees from the music scene surrounding Virginia Commonwealth University. This unit found a job backing up an older vocal trio called the Montereys, saxophonist/flutist Smither remembers. “We played the college circuit, the fraternities in Charlottesville.” He laughs. “It was just like Animal House.”
The wry, husky Smither sits with me at the Union Hill Market in the heart of Church Hill — the band’s old stomping grounds. Once together, he says, the group’s racially diverse lineup — four members were black, three white — was never an issue in 1970s Richmond. “In fact, at that time, it was a selling point.”
The band’s first job was backing up the Norfolk singer Charlie Whitehead, he recalls. The lineup was Thomas, Bryant, Hughes, Smither, Dwyer, keyboardist Clifton Smith and tenor saxophonist Odis Hamlin. The latter two came with Thomas. “It was basically the original Whole Darn Family,” Smither says.
They got the job through Jerry Williams, a Portsmouth-born performer and producer better known as Swamp Dogg. Working out of Philadelphia, he was managing Whitehead and had collaborated with Thomas before. “Swamp had us on salary, whether we played or not,” Hughes says. “We were in the best hotels, things were nice … the good life.”
Little Tommy Meets Mr. Wiggles
Tyrone Thomas leans back and smiles at the memory of the Whole Darn Family. “People just couldn’t believe that these white dudes were so funky.”
In the summer of 2011, I visited Thomas at his Church Hill home to talk about the reunion of the Jarmels, a Richmond-based group whose song “A Little Bit of Soap” made it to No. 12 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1961. While not a founding member, Thomas was overseeing the quartet’s rebirth along with the original Jarmels’ Ray Smith, recording an album and appearing on the PBS Rock, Pop & Doo Wop TV show.
Thomas started performing around Richmond as “Little Tommy” when he was a pre-teen. “I was living on St. Paul in Jackson Ward — Gilpin Court ... I had a group called Little Tommy and the Teenagers, and Major Harris ( later with the Delfonics ) was singing with us.” He adds, “We opened for Mary Wells,
Sam Cooke, Little Richard, we worked with everybody.” In 1965, around the same time he began playing the drums, the diminutive singer recorded his first 45, the hard-pounding ballad “I’m Hurt,” and it was something of a regional hit. “It could’ve gone on to be bigger,” Thomas says. “I did it for Wiggles’ label, Sound of Soul.”
Mr. Wiggles, born Alexander Randolph, was also known as Dickie Diamond (more aliases would come, including August Moon, as he is now known). A singer and dancer who also had his hand in concert merchandising, Randolph had just served a stint in New Jersey’s Rahway State Prison for drug possession. As Mr. Wiggles, he recorded a 45 on his own Golden Triangle label in 1964, a Jimmy Reed takeoff called “Wash My Back.” A year later, “I’m Hurt” by Little Tommy was waxed in Philly in a three-day session, along with several other recordings by artists like Dickie Wonder and Little Richard’s former band, the Upsetters. A young Jimi Hendrix plays guitar on some of the tracks.
“Here comes this guy one day after a show,” Thomas says, remembering the young Wiggles. “Silk suit, blazer, hair looking pretty. He was a true hustler.”
Wiggles continued to make and produce records throughout the ’60s — including his own indelible “Homeboy,” a jivester’s love letter to Richmond — but Thomas says he was never paid for his input. “I was Sound of Soul, for whatever it’s worth,” he says. “I never received a royalty for anything I did.” That didn’t stop the two from hooking up again and again. In the early 1970s, Thomas appeared on the producer’s compilation album, Free Angela, designed to raise money for political activist Angela Davis’ legal defense. Wiggles also briefly managed Patti LaBelle and the Bluebelles — later Labelle — and hired Thomas as the leader of their backing band.
One night, Thomas got a call. “I picked it up and heard, ‘Hey, geezer.’ Wiggles was calling me from the jail, long distance. He was serving time for second-degree murder. ‘I got a lot of time to think,’ he told me. ‘Sitting here thinking about how I ain’t treat you right … but when I get out this time, man, I’m going to treat you fair and we’re going to be partners, the whole nine yards.’" Thomas exhales. “I should’ve learned.”
Fly Away Love Bird
The Whole Darn Family’s early repertoire was cover songs by KC and the Sunshine Band, Kool and the Gang, and the Ohio Players — but they began integrating similarly funky Little Tommy originals into the set. “After awhile, we would do a set of covers and we’d do a set of ours and crowds danced just as hard to our songs,” Woudy Hughes recalls, adding that a man named Sammy Hunter was their first manager. “He didn’t know much about the music business, but he knew how to have a good time and if we needed something, he would go get it.”
“Seven Minutes of Funk” was first played in a private home at 23rd and W streets in Richmond’s East End, Smither says. “It was owned by someone Sammy knew, I think her name was Annie. We rehearsed in her living room. Seven pieces.” He remembers Thomas calling out for something like “Skin Tight,” Hughes firing up the bass, and everyone falling in. “Nobody wrote the tune,” he says. “The band wrote the tune. Tommy tightened it, but it was thrown together.”
The “Whole Damn Family,” as they were originally known, would gig in mostly black clubs, like Ebony Island on Richmond’s North Side (now the Cultural Diversity Center) and Ashland’s Jamaica Country Club. They also performed consistently in the white after-hours joint Laurel and Broadee, on the top floor of 727 W. Broad St. Their best remembered gigs were on the so-called “chitlin circuit” — joints like the Golden Eagle in Kannapolis, North Carolina, and the Ghana Club in Greenville, South Carolina. “People loved us in those places,” says Hughes. “One time we were running late, and we pulled up to the Ghana Club and the people came out to our vehicle, grabbed our instruments and took ‘em inside for us. It was so cool.” They also opened for the Godfather of Soul at the Fredericksburg Fairgrounds in 1975. “Man, you’ve got to be tight if James Brown is coming up behind you,” Hughes says.
The Whole Darn Family had been together for a year when Thomas’ phone rang again. “Wiggles called me and said he was at the airport. I rolled on down to pick him up, carried him to his sister’s house. He knew about the Whole Darn Family. The band had been working on original material, hoping to get on with some label.” Three months later, Sammy Hunter was out and Mr. Wiggles, by then known as August Moon, was the band’s new manager. “There was a studio that he’d worked with in Atlanta called the Sound Pit,” Thomas recalls. “He could get us in there.”
“[Moon] had the juice to get us recorded,” Smither says. “We were excited.” He pauses and smiles. “But let’s just say that I didn’t find him to be a trustworthy individual.”
When Moon came in, along with Eugene Mays, a road manager, changes happened. “At that time, we had two girls singing with us,” Hughes recalls. “One day, Moon said, ‘Those girls got to go.’ He was right, they sounded terrible; it had been Little Tommy’s idea. ‘And Sam Dwyer has got to go, too.’ ” So the Whole Darn Family needed a new trumpet player. Girard Bowe, known as “Giz,” was a 19-year-old VCU music dropout hitchhiking into town one morning. “Joel Smither picked me up,” Bowe says. “I had my trumpet case, and we traded phone numbers.”
“When Giz came in, everything changed,” Hughes says. “The horn section tightened up like Tower of Power.”
“I loved the songs, loved the music,” Bowe says. “By the time I got in the band, almost all of the original music had been written, and Little Tommy came up with most of that and the lyrics. Everything but ‘Seven Minutes of Funk.’ ”
Before they went to Atlanta to record, Smither’s saxophone and flute had been stolen in Petersburg. “And this is why I love Sammy Hunter,” the horn player recalls. “He brought me a flute, and this was after his feelings had been hurt from being let go. It was not much of a flute, but that’s what I played on that album.”
In Atlanta, they wound up with a flat tire in rush-hour traffic, finally arriving at the Sound Pit, waiting for the studio to open. “All of a sudden, a big limo pulled up,” Hughes remembers. “And Ted Nugent and Meat Loaf and all of them fall out.” At the same time that the Whole Darn Family was recording, Nugent was working on his Free-For-All album, which featured a then-unknown vocalist, Michael Lee Aday, aka Meat Loaf.
Tyrone Thomas directed the late-night sessions, which lasted only a few days. Some Atlanta musicians were added to fatten the sound — a rhythm guitarist, a second keyboardist, conga player and three extra horns. Bowe remembers cutting his parts in one long night, and there is much admiration for Milan Bogdan, the Sound Pit’s patient sound engineer.
“Seven Minutes of Funk” was almost an afterthought. “We named it in the studio,” Hughes says. “[Its length] was 6:50, so Moon said it should be called ‘Seven Minutes of Funk.’ Moon’s real good at putting a tag on something. He’s named a lot of songs, but Little Tommy will tell you, Moon didn’t write anything on the album.”
Arrival and Departure
The album, The Whole Darn Family Has Arrived, featured a cover photo of the band draped around August Moon’s 1948 Cadillac in front of the Ethyl Corp. headquarters (now NewMarket Corp.). It was released on Moon’s Soul International label in 1976 and distributed by Amherst Records, out of Buffalo, New York, which also administered the song publishing.
The eight-cut, 33-minute platter is steeped in flamboyant mid-’70s funk and soul — á la contemporaries War, the Bar-Kays and Brick — sassy horns, thumping bass, and Little Tommy’s brilliantly syncopated percussion and impassioned vocals. “You Know that You Lied” is a scene-setting first track; “New Yorkin’ ” is a P-Funk-esque strut; the ballad “I’m Hurt” is given a ’70s facelift; and “Stuck on Yourself” is a funky put-down with searing Tommy Bryant guitar. “Seven Minutes of Funk” closes side one.
Thomas and Moon took songwriting credit on all the tunes, which rankled the band. “Now I ask you this,” Hughes says. “How could Moon have co-written the songs when he was in jail when they were written? I was naïve; I didn’t know anything about publishing.” The members signed contracts with Moon that they would later regret, whereupon they were issued August Moon Inc. employee cards — as Bowe says, “treated like hired help.”
On release, the album’s first single, “Ain’t Nothing But Something to Do,” sank quickly. It was the dawn of disco, and DJs in New York started spinning “Seven Minutes of Funk” instead, paying particular interest to the bass intro. This prompted the release of a special 12-inch disco mix of the song. None of this mattered to the band. It was disintegrating.
According to Hughes, Smither and Bowe, Thomas was taking money off the top. “It was terrible,” Hughes says. “We got beat with the record deal, fine. It’s one thing to get ripped out from the outside, but this? That was the end of the Whole Darn Family.”
Thomas doesn’t remember it that way. He says the band broke up after a couple of bookings down South where promoters ran off with their money. On one particularly doomed Florida trip soon after the record’s release, the band members, broke and hungry, limped to Macon, Georgia, and had to beg Zelma Redding, Otis’ widow, for $100 to get home. “That shut down the Whole Darn Family,” he says.
“The Whole Darn Family Has Arrived” was released in 1976 and featured “Seven Minutes of Funk.” From left to right: Odis Hamlin, Woudy Hughes, Clifton Smith, Tommy Bryant, Tyrone “Little Tommy” Thomas, Girard “Giz” Bowe and Joel Smither.
In 1978, a second release of The Whole Darn Family Has Arrived was issued by Tyrone Thomas and the Whole Darn Family. The cover featured Thomas, Odis Hamlin and Clifton Smith along with four new players. The record was the original sessions, with one curious difference: “Seven Minutes of Funk” now had a repetitive conga overdub, often blurring the distinctive bass line. The second version was remixed by Moon at his friend Marvin Gaye’s studio in Los Angeles, and released without Amherst Records’ consent or knowledge.
“The trickery,” Hughes says with angst. “To take the same album, the same songs, wrap it in a different cover, put different musicians on the cover, and present it to people. It’s unreal.”
Thomas says that he was, again, ripped off. “Wiggles did leave me a 50-percent writer’s share but took my 50-percent publishing share. But I actually wrote everything on the album other than ‘Fly Away Love Bird’ [written by Richmond singer Larry Saunders, who recorded extensively for Moon over the years] and ‘Leave Me Alone’ [by another Sound of Soul veteran, Oscar Wright]. I should have received a 50-percent publisher’s share.”
“The new band didn’t work,” Thomas admits. “They were good, but we had developed a flavor with the original band, and a respect and a harmonious situation.”
“Tommy had stars in his eyes,” Giz Bowe says. “He wanted to make it big, and August Moon promised him that, and he delivered to a degree. He got a record contract and an LP out of it … the sad part of it is that whatever Little Tommy claims August Moon did to him, is what August Moon and Little Tommy did to the band.”
I’m Hurt
“Tommy and me, we’re putting together a new Whole Darn Family,” the 77-year-old man in the wheelchair tells me.
The TV is on, loudly, and August Moon, aka Mr. Wiggles, is in his cramped first-floor bedroom in the suburban Meadowbrook Farm subdivision in Chesterfield County. He’s dubbing VHS copies of his old cable access show, Tell It Like It Is, onto DVD. On the screen, his younger self is battling it out with a telephone caller from 1992. “I’m going to make these available on iTunes,” he says, his speech slurred from several strokes.
Whosampledwho.com, an online resource that traces the origins of specific samples in hip-hop, lists 34 different songs that have used “Seven Minutes of Funk.” It’s touched East Coast, West Coast, old-school and many sub-joints in between. Most of the money accrued has gone to Amherst Records and Moon, who is wearing the same “Stop the Violence” T-shirt that he appears in on the TV screen. “People owe me money, big money right now,” he says. “I have said nothing because every time I get ready to, something happens to me health-wise.”
Moon was born Alexander Randolph in a two-room shack on Fourth and Maury street. He got his start in show business by working as a valet for stars like Big Mama Thornton and Wynonie Harris at Gregory’s Ballroom and the Hippodrome, before he started singing and dancing himself. “Little Red” — his first nickname — spent his teenage years in a juvenile home. He joined the Navy in 1954, and then became a protégé of Richmond’s pioneering black DJ Allen Knight, which led to performing on package tours with the likes of Ruth Brown, Chuck Berry and Fats Domino. He would eventually own a record store, a grocery and a nightclub, in addition to his small, but rich, back catalog of prime soul and funk. In his hometown, many still equate him as the fiery militant voice of local talk radio and TV.
Mr. Wiggles, now known as August Moon. (Photo courtesy August Moon)
Over the years, Moon has suffered a heart attack in addition to strokes; a home health care nurse monitors him. He is surrounded with reminders from his colorful past, the walls adorned with memorabilia, citations, certificates and photos of him posing with Muhammad Ali, Jesse Jackson, Doug Wilder, Marvin Gaye and George Allen (who once declared “August Moon Day” for his contributions to job training for inner-city youth). There are 8-by-10s of Mayor Dwight Jones, family portraits and poster-size shots of himself as Mr. Wiggles — actually wiggling in one photo.
Moon admits to serving two different prison terms in New Jersey, the latter for second-degree murder when a heroin deal went bad and an associate died. “I was in the wrong place at the wrong time,” he says. In 1975, after serving four years (and making friends with fellow inmate Rubin “Hurricane” Carter), he was paroled and scared straight, he says. “I never went back.” (Moon had his civil rights restored by then-Gov. L. Douglas Wilder in 1993.)
He says that it was road manager Eugene Mays, along with Tyrone Thomas, who helped to break up the Whole Darn Family. “They was skimming money. I was in California, traveling all over. I wasn’t around to look after things,” he says, also challenging the notion that he stole songs. “Woudy was never a writer. Nobody but me and Tommy was a writer. We would work on both music and lyrics.” What about Tyrone Thomas’ publishing share? “Berry Gordy owned Motown. And Berry Gordy always had the publishing rights.” Moon says. “Am I right?” As for the original Whole Darn Family, he faults the members for not staying together through adversity.
Today, Moon has no problem reconciling his different personas — former drug peddler, activist, music maker, businessman, born-again Christian. “A black man’s got to do what he’s got to do in America.”
Where Are They Now?
The Whole Darn Family’s original guitarist, Tommy Bryant, still lives in the Richmond area and performs under the name “TBar” (for a time, he played beach music with Ron Moody and the Centaurs). He declines an interview because he’s thinking about writing a book. “I get upset every time that band’s name comes up,” he says. Odis Hamlin, the band’s tenor saxophonist, died in 1993, while Sound Pit engineer Milan Bogdan passed away this year. Clifton Smith, the keyboardist, is said to be a preacher in Las Vegas, but attempts to locate him were unsuccessful.
Despite his previous willingness to talk about the influential band he led 40 years ago, Tyrone Thomas did not initially respond to requests to talk anew about the Whole Darn Family. As we were going to press, he called, corroborating the earlier interview and strenuously denying that he skimmed money. “There was no money to skim,” he says. He also defends Eugene Mays, who died in 2010. “He was a very nice man. He was like the buffer between the group and August Moon.” Thomas says that Hughes should be credited for the unique wah-wah sound of that famous “Seven Minutes” bass line, abetted by a jury-rigged Mu-Tron effects pedal. But he claims to be the originator of the riff. “I taught it to Clifton Smith, who showed it to the group at rehearsal,” he says.
Tyrone Thomas, aka Little Tommy, in the 1970s. (Photo courtesy: Alive NaturalSound Records)
Thomas, who performs 30 dates a year with the Jarmels, is not interested in a new Whole Darn Family, though he did talk to Moon about the project. “I kept trusting him, but not any more.” You can still hear a cracking in his voice when he talks about his old band. “To us, in the Whole Darn Family, there was no black or white,” he had said in 2011. “We were brothers and we did this thing. It was so beautiful. And to see it crumble like that …”
Smither, a packaging contractor, still has his horns but no longer plays. He says of Thomas, “He can’t read a lick of music, but has the best ears of anybody I’ve ever met in my life. Amazing talent. Solid drummer.” Would Smither work with him again? “Not a chance.”
Giz Bowe, who runs an ABC store, has played trumpet in bands like Klaxton Brown, Second Nature and, his latest outfit, Xtreme Groove. “All of them have performed ‘Seven Minutes,’ ” he says. Bowe did gigs with Thomas years after the Whole Darn Family folded, in Little Tommy and the Flashback Revue. “I think Tommy is a musical genius,” Bowe says. “I also think he’s a manipulator. But there’s no hard feelings. It was 40 years ago. I don’t expect to get any money, but it’s very hurtful to Woudy. Not only did he not get a cent, someone else is taking credit for his work.”
Hughes took a nightshift job at Philip Morris in 1978, and stayed 30 years. “You see yourself as a launching pad for a lot of groups,” he says. “It makes you feel good but it makes you feel bad.” He’s only recently started playing the bass again, for a group called Divas and Gents. “I even got something good to say about Moon,” he says. “If it wasn’t for Moon, even if he did what he did, we wouldn’t be sitting here talking.”
“I stuck by Woudy,” Moon says defiantly. “When he was about to lose his house, he came to me. “
“It’s true, I did ask him for money to help pay off my note,” Hughes says. “He gave me $300, which I consider to be a personal victory.”
The complicated legal battles involving the sampling of “Seven Minutes of Funk” lasted several years, with Amherst Records and Harlem Music suing Moon (he had licensed the song to EPMD without permission) and bringing a suit against Jay Z and Roc-A-Fella Records over “Ain’t No Nigga,” a duet with Foxy Brown from 1996. Moon also sued Jay Z, as well as Amherst and Harlem, over royalties related to sampling. The end result is that Moon and Tyrone Thomas are now listed as co-writers of Jay Z’s first hit. Thomas says he didn’t start receiving royalty checks until 2002.
When Jay Z, along with Russell Simmons, the Def Jam label founder, came to Virginia Union University in 2008 to campaign for Barack Obama, Hughes made sure to be there. “Tell Jay Z that Woudy Hughes, who played the bass on his first big record, is here,” he remembers saying. Simmons introduced Hughes to the crowd. “He told me, ‘You know something, you played on my group EPMD’s first big hit, ‘It’s My Thing’ and I knew Jay Z was struggling. I took your album over to Jay Z and told him to sample this bass line and he’d get a hit. Boom! It happened.’ ”
Woudy Hughes (center) with Jay Z (left) and Def Jam founder Russell Simmons. (Photo courtesy: Woudy Hughes)
Beaming with pride, Hughes claims that Jay Z hugged him and told him he’d always wanted to meet him.
