Chucky Thompson: Producer who reshaped Nineties R&B and hip-hop

Chucky Thompson, who played the congas in Chuck Brown’s go-go band before reshaping 1990s hip-hop and R&B as a producer working on hit albums by the Notorious B.I.G., Mary J Blige and Faith Evans, has died aged 53 from complications of Covid-19.

A multi-instrumentalist who played guitar, bass, drums, keyboards and trombone, Thompson came to prominence as one of the Hitmen, the in-house producers who helped make Bad Boy Records a music industry powerhouse in the Nineties. His music stitched together old and new, with recognisable R&B, soul and gospel samples layered over pulsing bass lines and propulsive drum beats.

Teaming up with Bad Boy founder Sean Combs (also known as Puff Daddy, Diddy and Love, among other stage names), Thompson produced several songs on the Notorious B.I.G.’s 1994 debut album, Ready to Die – including one of Biggie’s biggest hits, the sultry, slowed-down “Big Poppa”, which sampled the Isley Brothers’ “Between the Sheets” and peaked at No 1 on the Billboard rap chart.

Later that year, he had producing or songwriting credits on nearly every song from Blige’s Grammy-nominated second album, My Life. The record sold more than three million copies, balancing soulful samples from Isaac Hayes and Al Green with introspective lyrics that Blige wrote while battling depression, and drug and alcohol abuse.

“I was singing for my life, literally,” she said in a documentary, Mary J Blige’s My Life, that premiered on Amazon Prime in June. In an Instagram post on Monday, she called her collaboration with Thompson “a musical match made in heaven”, describing him as “an angel sent to help me weather my storm”.

“She knew a lot of the records I knew growing up,” Thompson told Rolling Stone in an interview, recalling how they bonded over their shared taste in music. “She’s going through a situation; I’m bringing Curtis Mayfield to the table. That’s the tissue you need to dry your tears.”

While working on My Life, he met Biggie’s wife, Evans, who invited him to produce her studio debut, Faith (1995). The album included the smouldering Top 40 single “Soon as I Get Home”, which Thompson said he had written with a friend when he was 16. He was playing the song in the studio, passing the time on the piano between sessions, when Evans overheard him and asked him to produce it for the album that same day, just before he was supposed to catch a flight out of New York.

“I whipped through that song so fast just because I was trying to get out of there,” he told the Recording Academy in an interview last month. “She called me later that night and told me to call her answering machine because she put the hook on there. Puff mixed it, and that’s the version that you hear.”

Thompson also produced one of Usher’s first hits, “Think of You”; worked with artists including Total, New Edition, TLC and the District duo Born Jamericans; and mentored producers including Rich Harrison and Young Guru. After leaving Bad Boy in the late 1990s, he produced one of Nas’s standout singles, “One Mic”, which he built around a portion of Phil Collins’s “In the Air Tonight”.

But he remained best known for his work with Bad Boys Records, where he collaborated with influential producers such as Easy Mo Bee, Deric “D-Dot” Angelettie and Ron “Amen-Ra” Lawrence, developing beats and melodies while playing around in the label’s New York studio.

During his first “real session” there, he picked up a guitar and “started playing along with what Easy Mo Bee was doing”, Thompson recalled in the Recording Academy interview. “He heard it and immediately wanted to record it. That became the guitar parts on ‘Ready to Die,’” the title track from Biggie’s first album. “That was always the energy.”

Carl Edward Thompson Jr was born in Washington on 12 July 1968. He grew up in the LeDroit Park neighbourhood, studied at Dunbar High School and played keyboards in local go-go bands, lying about his age to go on tour with Chuck Brown, the “godfather of go-go”, when he was 16.

“In New York, everyone wanted to play with Miles Davis. In the District, everyone wanted to play with Chuck Brown,” Thompson told The Washington Post in 2014. “Just being affiliated with him gave you stripes. I learned the business of music from Chuck – the side that involves money and keeping other people happy: the audience, the promoters, the musicians.”

He was 24 when Blige asked him to produce her My Life album, after she had been impressed by a tape of his song “Be With You” and decided to record it for the album. “Man, I wanted to do backflips when I heard her say that,” Thompson said. He credited Blige and Combs with trusting him to incorporate R&B samples on songs like “My Life,” the title track, which used Roy Ayers’s “Everybody Loves the Sunshine”.

“You’re grabbing something that’s been classic for 20 years and then put it with a young perspective,” he told Rolling Stone. “I look at what we did with her as almost the same thing that Quincy Jones did with Michael Jackson. You got Quincy who’s seasoned, older, and Michael is younger. Those two energies together are the reason you can play a song like ‘Beat It’, a record that came out in the 1980s, to kids today, and they’ll jump around like that [music] is brand new.”

In 1997, The Post reported that Thompson had started his own District-based label, ChuckLife, with his wife, Tracie, as general manager. His publicist said he is survived by five children and two sisters.

Thompson produced several Grammy-nominated R&B recordings in the 2000s, including Emily King’s album East Side Story, Maryland singer Raheem DeVaughn’s single “Woman” and Ledisi’s album Turn Me Loose. He also composed the music for a Tuskegee Airmen documentary that aired on the History channel earlier this year, and returned to go-go music as a producer for Rare Essence and the last three studio albums by Brown

Until his death, he was working on a documentary about the genre, which had emerged out of funk music around the time he was born and flourished in Washington dance halls, even as it struggled to catch on elsewhere in the country.

“This is to show people that may not know what it is, how it’s made and how it can be used,” he told the Recording Academy, describing the doc. “I wanna see a go-go band in Kansas City. We have a few other projects, but I just want to put the flag down for my city and let them know we’re about to expose some things.”

Chucky Thompson, producer, born 12 July 1968, died 9 August 2021

© The Washington Post