The poet whose voice ended up on a Fatboy Slim hit

Camille Yarbrough has worn many titles: singer, dancer, actress, poet, activist, television producer and author. Born in 1934, she grew up on the South Side of Chicago as the seventh and youngest child in her family. As a teenager she danced with the Katherine Dunham Company, a start that sets the tone for a life spent moving between stage and spoken word.

Her debut album, The Iron Pot Cooker, came out on Vanguard Records in 1975. It grew from a 1971 stage dramatization of her one-woman spoken word show, Tales and Tunes of an African American Griot, which she toured nationally in the 1970s and 1980s. The show was also produced at the La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club in Manhattan's East Village in 1973.

“Take Yo' Praise” was written, she said, for all the people who had come through the civil rights movement and stood up for truth, righteousness and justice, because human beings need to praise and respect one another more than they do. Critics heard something ahead of its time. Journalist Kevin Powell called the album a precursor to Lauryn Hill's best-seller, and Spin described her as a “hip-hop foremother”.

In 1999 a vocal sample from the opening of “Take Yo' Praise” appeared prominently in Fatboy Slim's “Praise You”. Decades later, in 2021, Yarbrough said she liked the track, feeling that Norman Cook had kept the essence of her song. Her second album, Ancestor House, arrived in 2003 on her own Maat Music label, recorded live at Joe's Pub in New York, and in 1979 her children's book Cornrows won the Coretta Scott King Award. Some voices find their audience slowly.