The original track Fatboy Slim sampled as Praise You turns 50

The original track Fatboy Slim sampled as Praise You is now 50 years old, and not many people know the original artist

Fatboy Slim released his hit track Praise You in 1999. The song was released on the English producer/DJ’s second studio album, “You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby”, on 4 January that year. It quickly became a huge success, receiving a nomination for Best Dance Recording at the 2000 Grammy Awards and a double platinum record in the UK. Also, a music video for the song was directed by American filmmakers Spike Jonze and Roman Coppola, in a guerrilla-style, costing around USD 800 to make. Nevertheless, like the basic track, the music video itself was a huge success. This included winning the Breakthrough Video, Best Direction, and Best Choreography categories at the 1999 MTV Video Music Awards. It’s also worth noting that Fatboy Slim recently reached his 100th Glastonbury performance.

However, given these great successes, many people don’t know that Fatboy Slim sampled several earlier songs and sounds to create “Praise You”. One of these was a track on the test album “Sessions”, released by JBL in 1973, where he took the piano sound from “Balance and Rehearsal”. The original song, from which the producer took a snippet of the opening vocals, was composed by American singer Camille Yarbrough. The original song was a love letter for an African-American man. Camille released the song as “Take Yo’ Praise”, back in 1975 on BGP Records. Interestingly, the songwriter said in a 2021 interview for WhoSampled that she loved “Praise You” and that Norman Cook, aka Fatboy Slim, used her vocals on it.