3/28/2024 0 Comments Richard finch parent sunshine band![]() Get Down Tonight cinched the partnership. Smith and Casey collaborated on the demo that would become TK artist George McCrae’s 1974 hit, Rock Me Baby. singer and Grammy-winner Betty Wright, of Where Is The Love fame - now Sister Bettye Wright, who sang at Smith’s memorial service on Saturday. Casey and studio partner Finch were writing and producing for various T.K. Records, a Miami label run by r&b impresario Henry Stone, that led to KC and the Sunshine Band. It was their mutual involvement with T.K. “The next thing I knew I was the lead singer,” said Casey.īut only briefly. Harry Wayne “KC” Casey, a vocalist at the time, saw the Oceanliners one night in the early ’70s and sat in for a few songs. Smith sharpened his playing in local groups such as the Oceanliners and Thunder, Lightning & Rain. “They used to just get together and start trying to play instruments.”Īll three would grow up to join KC and the Sunshine Band. “Those three were best friends as little boys coming up,” said Carolyn Smith. He and older sibling Ronnie Smith got the beginnings of a childhood band together with help from another kid from their Miami neighborhood, Robert Johnson. “He was self-taught,” said Carolyn Smith. ![]() Jerome Smith picked up his first guitar without too much encouragement at home. “It was his soul in that guitar,” Casey said in an interview this week, “and he played it like no other person could play it.” Teasing fills and funky lines out of his favorite white Fender guitar, Smith was right there for the wild ride that began in 1975 and wound down with modern dance pop’s first decade. Miami native Smith played on several more hits, including That’s The Way (I Like It), (Shake Shake Shake) Shake Your Booty and I’m Your Boogie Man. He played the flurry of notes - tape-doctored in the studio to create a high, trilling pitch - that launched Get Down Tonight, the group’s first No. It was Smith’s guitar, in fact, that announced the Sunshine explosion. Harry Wayne Casey and Richard Finch get most of the popular credit for the success of the original “Miami Sound.” Casey and Finch, playing keyboards and bass, respectively, for KC and the Sunshine Band, wrote and produced the funky songs that helped to make South Florida a dance kingdom of the ’70s.īut there was another key element to the KC sound and the first Miami wave: guitarist Jerome Smith. ![]()
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