Bumpin' In Nashville!

Jackey Beavers - Somebody Help The Beggar Man

Jackey Beavers' "I Need My Baby" is probably one of the best-known Northern Soul songs of all time, and his contributions to the history of Motown are important to that label's history. Overall, though, Beavers' recordings are pretty obscure. Some biographical details are here and I'll defer to them for most of this write-up. Beavers found himself working with John Richbourg at Sound Stage Seven and Richbourg's own Seventy Seven label at the end of the '60s and into the early '70s, where he wrote for several of Richbourg's artists and recorded everything from soul to funk to gospel as a solo artist, none of which was particularly successful (one recording was a remake of "Someday We'll Be Together," which he had written and recorded with Johnny Bristol many years earlier - see this post about the great, but mostly unknown, Jackey & Johnny version). "Somebody Help The Beggar Man" is a solid piece of get-down that was released on Seventy Seven in 1974 (at some point the record also came out on Buddah). Beavers and a male chorus provide some off-kilter and pretty meaningless lyrics, as the bumping proto-disco groove is the star of the record. The flip, the strangely titled "Mr. Bump Man (Lend Me a Hand) (Part II)" keeps the groove alive for another three minutes.