It's Just Begun

• 1. Introduction

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  It's Just Begun, the second album by the Jimmy Castor Bunch, arrived in 1972 on RCA Records. The title sits on the cover like a promise. And in a strange way, it was. Two tracks from that record would travel far beyond the genre categories of their moment, turning up in the foundational DNA of an entirely new art form.

  The questions worth asking are not just what the album contains, but why those particular grooves grabbed so many ears decades after the record first pressed. What made a three-and-a-half-minute funk track from 1972 a B-Boy staple? What was Jimmy Castor's band building in the studio that year? And how did an album that AllMusic would later call an important release from a sadly underrated group end up sampled more than a hundred times?

• 2. The Sound of the Bunch

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  Jimmy Castor led a band that brought together a distinctive combination of instruments. He handled saxophone, timbales, and vocals himself. Doug Gibson played bass and added backing vocals. Harry Jensen was on guitar, Lenny Fridie Jr. handled congas, and Gerry Thomas played both trumpet and piano.

  The album's opening and closing pieces, "Creation (Prologue)" and "Creation (Epilogue)," called on an orchestra of 30 musicians. That kind of ambition, a full orchestra wrapped around a funk core, signals what the Jimmy Castor Bunch was reaching for. The songwriting credits across the track listing show tight collaboration, with Thomas, Castor, and John Pruitt sharing writing duties on several cuts. The song "L.T.D. (Life, Truth and Death)," credited to Thomas and Curtis Knight, runs over seven minutes, giving it the longest runtime on the record.

• 3. The Tracks That Traveled

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  "Troglodyte (Cave Man)" climbed to number 6 on the Billboard Hot 100 and number 4 on the R&B chart in 1972. In Canada, the single reached number 1. Those chart positions marked its first life. Its second life came through compilation albums, appearing on more than 20 of them, spanning collections as different in character as 16 Slabs of Funk and Greatest Soul Groups.

  The title track, "It's Just Begun," took a different path to influence. It became a B-Boy staple, meaning dancers and DJs in the emerging hip-hop scene treated it as essential material. Both songs became sampling touchstones. Across both tracks, the album's songs have been sampled more than 100 times. The song is also considered by some to be among the first disco songs, placing it at an intersection of genres that were still being defined when the record dropped.

• 4. Chart Performance and Legacy

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  The album reached number 27 on the Billboard 200 and number 11 on the R&B charts. In Canada it landed at number 21. Those are solid placements for a record that received no canonical blockbuster treatment at the time of release.

  AllMusic, the music database, gave the record a 3-star rating and described it as an important and influential release from a sadly underrated group, calling it well worth a listen for anyone interested in the roots of 1970s funk. That framing, important and underrated in the same breath, captures the peculiar position the album occupies. The commercial numbers were respectable. The cultural footprint, measured in samples and compilation appearances, grew considerably after the fact. The collaborators on "I Promise to Remember," Jimmy Castor and Jimmy Smith, left behind a track that rounds out a record still circulating in the crates of producers working long after 1972.