Betty Wright (born December 21, 1953 in Miami, Florida) is a soul and R&B singer who influenced a generation of female singer-songwriters and also influenced the world of hip hop who sampled her most famed material. Wright is renowned for her ability to sing in the whistle register. She is one of few singers deemed as a seventh octave wonder.
Vocal Profile
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Voice Type : Piccolo Coloratura Soprano
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Highest Note : Eb-7('No Pain No Gain'), C7 ('After The Pain')
Music career
Born singing gospel with the family group, the Echoes of Joy, Wright began switching to R&B music in 1965 when she was only 11. In 1968, she released her first album, "My First Time Around", at the age of 15, and scored her first hit, "Girls Can't Do What Guys Can Do". But it wasn't until the end of 1971 that Wright's most successful phase of her career took place.
The self-penned, "Clean Up Woman", became a Top 5 pop and R&B smash and would later influence a remix of Mary J. Blige's "Real Love" single with the sample of its guitar riffs; R&B girl group trio SWV's "I'm So Into You" also featured a sample from "Clean Up Woman," as did Afrika Bambaataa's song "Zulu War Chant." In 1974, Wright scored big with the songs "Tonight is the Night" (about a real-life love affair that happened with Wright when she was a teenager) and "Where is the Love" (which won her a Grammy for Best R&B Song). After experiencing a brief slump in the early-1980s, she rebounded finding her own label, Miss B Records, and in 1988 made music history by being the first woman to have a platinum record on her own label with the release of "After the Pain", which featured two of her biggest hits in years, "No Pain No Gain" and the title track. On both songs, Wright displays her powerful upper register capabilities. In the aforementioned "After The Pain", Wright hit a C7 note.
Still recording music to this day, she now mentors several young singers and has sung backup for acts such as Gloria Estefan, Jennifer Lopez and Joss Stone. When R&B group Color Me Badd released their huge hit, "I Wanna Sex You Up", in 1991, it generated controversy because the sample from "Tonight is the Night" hadn't been cleared; Wright soon took the band to court for royalties and was awarded 35% percent of royalties for writing the song.
Her cover of the song "Shoo-Rah! Shoo-Rah!" was recently used in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy movie.
Wright currently resides in Miami.
On December 24, 2005, her 21-year-old son Patrick Parker was shot and killed after a dispute at a Christmas party in Opa-locka, a Miami suburb. [1]
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