I don’t think I’ve ever heard Camille Yarbrough’s song except in the sample so famously used by Fatboy Slim in his hit single Praise You.

So famously that I was expecting that stutter on the chorus, but I don’t think they’d invented the technology for that when Ms Yarbrough recorded the original – Take Yo’ Praise – back in 1975.

My research describes Yarbrough, who is still alive at the age of 92, as “an American singer, dancer, actress, poet, activist, television producer and author.”

Once described as a “foremother of hip-hop,” she might not be a household name but she’s a kind of cross between Nina Simone and Gil Scott-Heron and certainly deserves to be more widely known; not least for this tune.

She grew up on the South Side of Chicago and recorded this song for her debut album, The Iron Pot Cooker, based on the 1971 stage dramatization of her one-woman spoken word show Tales And Tunes Of An African American Griot.

The album has since been acclaimed as an inspiration for, and precursor of, Lauryn Hill’s million-selling album The Mis-Education of Lauryn Hill.

Throughout the Seventies and Eighties, Yarbrough toured America with the show, first produced at La MaMa Exerimental Theatre Club in New York’s East Village in 1973.

She did not release another album until 2003 when she self-released Ancestor House, a spoken word soul/blues album recorded live in New York.
In a 2021 interview, Yarbrough said that she liked Fatboy Slim’s song Praise You and its use of her vocals, and felt Norman Cook had kept the “essence” of Take Yo’ Praise.

She said she wrote this song “for all the people who had come through the black civil rights movement, who had stood up for truth and righteousness and justice, because human beings need to praise and respect one another more than they do.”

Amen to that.