Eldee Young (January 7, 1936 – February 12, 2007) - Hey Pancho (1973)
Eldee Young (January 7, 1936 – February 12, 2007) - Hey Pancho (1973)
Young co-wrote this funky, hypnotic gangster groove with Isaac “Redd” Holt, off their hard-to-find Young-Holt Unlimited Plays Super Fly LP.
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The late great bassist Eldee Young (January 7, 1936 – February 12, 2007) was an original member of the Ramsey Lewis Trio who later formed Young-Holt Unlimited.
Young was born in Chicago. His brother taught him to play the guitar at age 10, but he fell in love with the upright bass when he was 13. In high school he met two other student musicians, pianist Ramsey Lewis who was also from Chicago, and drummer Isaac “Redd” Holt, whose family had come north from Mississippi. The three formed a jazz trio called the Cleffs, and played together for several years until Holt joined the army in 1955.
In 1956, Holt returned from being stationed in Germany and the three friends got back together as the Ramsey Lewis Trio. They released twenty records over the next decade, mostly on Chicago’s Argo label, the jazz subsidiary of Chess Records. None of them sold well until 1964’s More Sounds of Christmas.
It was their second Christmas album, and made it to #8 on the Billboard pop charts. Filled mostly with Christmas standards, it also contained Lewis’ laid back original composition “Egg Nog” on which Young laid down a particularly fierce bass line, and the upbeat, catchy “Plum Puddin’” written by Young.
The next year, during the summer of 1965, they released their breakthrough album The In Crowd. Recorded live that May at the Bohemian Caverns nightclub in Washington, D.C., they opened their set with the title track, a cover of a recent hit by Dobie Gray, written by Billy Page, the brother of legendary arranger and conductor Gene Page.
Their instrumental jazz version of the song was released as a single and took off, reaching #2 R&B and #5 on pop charts. Propelled by the title track, the album landed at #1 on the R&B albums chart and #2 on Billboard’s Top 200, and won the Grammy for Best Instrumental Jazz Performance in 1965. It was the first jazz record to crack the mainstream pop market.
Following the runaway success of The In Crowd, the band felt pressure to try and produce further pop hits. “That first hit record will stay with me until the day I die,” said Lewis years later. “In a period of two months, we went from earning fifteen hundred dollars a week to three thousand dollars a night.”
This pressure soon split up the trio’s original lineup. Young and Holt left in 1966 and were replaced by Cleveland Eaton and future Earth, Wind & Fire founder Maurice White. “We had worked so hard on this music together, and when the group broke up, it was like a family breakup,” Young said in a 1996 interview. “I took it very hard.”
Young and Holt formed a new band with Hysear Don Walker on piano, the Young-Holt Trio. Walker left after one album, and they renamed themselves Young-Holt Unlimited in 1967 after bringing organist Ken Chaney on board. The next year, the title track to Soulful Strut (1968) hit #3 on the Billboard pop charts. It was their third studio album on Brunswick Records.
They put out one more record on Brunswick, Just A Melody (1969), then signed with Atlantic Records, who released their next two albums on the Cotillion imprint. Mellow Dreamin’ (1970) and Born Again (1971) both failed to yield hits. After a final LP on Atlantic, Oh Girl, recorded in mid-1972 and released the next year, they were cut from the label. In 1973, inspired by the wave of Black films sweeping urban movie theaters across the nation, including the recent box-office smash Superfly (1972), they released their Young-Holt Unlimited Plays Super Fly LP.
It came out on Paula Records, a small record label out of Louisiana. Not many copies were pressed and it remained hard to find until it was reissued in June, 2022 by the Liberation Hall label for Record Store Day.
The first side featured covers of the most well-known cuts from Curtis Mayfield’s Superfly soundtrack, but closed out with one original written by Young and Holt. That song, the very funky “Hey Pancho,” sounded like it could have been written for the film, with Young’s bass and Ken Chaney’s organ swirling around each other to concoct a hypnotic gangster groove.
Young-Holt Unlimited broke up the next year in 1974, leaving this final record as a tantalizing glimpse of what other funky cuts they might have unleashed if they had kept making music throughout the seventies.
Further reading:
“Young-Holt Unlimited were more than Ramsey Lewis’s rhythm section,” by Steve Krakow, Chicago Reader, August 11, 2022.
“A short history of … “The ‘In’ Crowd” (Billy Page, 1964),” by Matt Micucci, JAZZIZ.com, July 25, 2017.
#jazz #funk #RamseyLewisTrio #YoungHoltUnlimited #EldeeYoung
Great read.