Funky Presidents' Day Jam Alert!

The Honey Drippers — "Impeach the President" (1973)

Greetings, Jagged Time Lapsers!

I was trying to think of the perfect seventies funk jam to kick off this Washington’s Birthday/President’s Day, and the choice was pretty clear.

I mean, sure — I could have gone with James Brown’s 1974 single “Funky President (People It’s Bad),” but the song’s message has always been rather undermined for me by the Godfather’s repeated assertion that “I need to be the Governor!” Even at his most lucid, putting Mr. Brown in a position of governmental authority would have been fairly disastrous, though probably not as much as allowing a certain reality TV star, serial casino bankrupter and convicted felon to return to the White House for a second go-round…

Some people say he’s guilty

Some people say I don’t know

Some people say give him a chance

Some people say wait ‘til he’s convicted

The Honey Drippers’ “Impeach the President” was written, recorded and released in 1973, right as the Watergate scandal was heating up and the first drops of flop sweat were starting to form on Richard Nixon’s fivehead.

The record was the creation of one Roy Charles Hammond, better known as Roy C. A prolific singer and songwriter whose soulful style and down-to-earth sense of humor wasn’t a million miles removed from that of the better-known Swamp Dogg, Roy C came up in the late fifties singing doo wop with The Genies, and scored his first solo hit in 1965 with “Shotgun Wedding”.

Never one to shy away from tackling controversial topics in song, Roy C first addressed the Oval Office with “Open Letter to the President,” a mournful 1971 B-side that begged for the end of the war in Vietnam, and freedom for oppressed folks in Georgia, South Africa and “up and down the streets of Harlem". Two years later, Roy C took aim again with the help of The Honey Drippers, a band of teenagers from Queens.

“I ran into a group of Black kids that went to Jamaica High School,” Roy C recalled in a 2013 issue of Wax Poetics. “I drilled them in the basement, and they were pretty good. So we recorded ‘Roy C.’s Theme [Song],’ ‘Impeach the President,’ and quite a few other songs... Some of them have never been released. I also used them on ‘Open Letter to the President.’ I worked hard with the drummer, because he wasn’t as good a drummer as I would have liked to have. But we finally accomplished what we set out to do. I had a good bass player and horn player, but the drummer was the weakest point. I remember drilling him over and over in that basement in Jamaica, Queens.”

Roy C must have been one hell of a drill sergeant, because the breakbeats that the (unfortunately nameless) drummer laid down in “Impeach the President” have been sampled over 800 times, beginning with Marley Marl snagging it for MC Shan’s “The Bridge” in 1986. Next to James Brown’s “The Funky Drummer,” it may be the most sampled groove of all time.

Despite its inherent funkiness and its release during what was, in retrospect, the golden age of politically and socially conscious soul music, “Impeach the President” wasn’t a hit. Maybe it was too raw, musically; maybe Alago (a small indie label founded by Roy C himself) didn’t have sufficient distribution, or maybe the lyrics were a little too frank for a country still in disbelief over the allegations of Nixon’s flagrant wrongdoings. But Roy C didn’t believe in pulling his punches.

“As a songwriter, I think we should be involved in the things happening around us,” he insisted in the same interview. “On [his 1973 album] Sex and Soul, I did a song called “I Wasn’t There (But I Can Feel the Pain).” I did two songs that Mercury [Recorda, his label at the time] didn’t like, and the other was called ‘Great, Great Grandson of a Slave’ on [1977’s] More Sex and More Soul. And that song earned me a trip to Chicago to meet the president of the company. He flew me in from New York and took me out to dinner. At that time, he was trying to tell me that they were not interested in that type of music. And to cure that situation, he wanted to assign me an outside songwriter. I said, ‘Hold it! I’m writing stuff, and it’s selling!’ But they thought I would be much bigger if I didn’t put out those types of songs.”

Behind the walls of the White House

There’s a lot of things we don’t know about

Behind the walls of the White House

There’s a lot of things we should know about

Listening to “Impeach the President” today, I honestly feel a little nostalgic for Richard Nixon. A complicated man whose paranoia and deviousness planted the seeds of his own destruction, he absolutely deserved to resign from the Presidency in shame. And yet, I have no doubt that Richard Nixon loved this country — he fought for it in World War II, devoted most of his adult life to public service, and did much to strengthen America’s relationships with international allies old and new.

Richard Nixon had many faults and committed some serious mistakes and transgressions, but I know damn well he wouldn’t have tried to destroy the US Department of Education. He wouldn’t have let an unelected South African fascist billionaire and a bunch of incel twerps dismantle our federal agencies without any Congressional oversight, or steal our personal data and put thousands of experienced and committed civil servants out of work in the name of “efficiency,” while at the same time spending millions of taxpayer dollars so that he could preen for the camera at the Super Bowl and the Daytona 500.

Nixon wouldn’t have endangered the lives and health of American citizens by ankling agencies like the CDC, HHS, NIH, OSHA or the FAA. He wouldn’t have willfully trashed longstanding international alliances, or sent his Vice President to Germany to cozy up to the local neo-Nazis and criticize European leaders for oppressing fascism. And he wouldn’t have loaded his cabinet with some of the most appallingly underqualified nominees in U.S. history. (Sure, he had ghouls like Henry Kissinger and Donald Rumsfeld advising him, but at least — like Nixon himself — they were legitimately qualified for their positions.)

So, this Presidents’ Day, I raise a glass to the memory of Richard Nixon, and to all the people — including in the mainstream press and the Republican Party — who had the backbone to stand up and send him packing when he tried to overextend his power. And I dedicate Roy C’s immortally funky groove to all the Americans here in 2025 (and there are many, many, many of us) who are refusing to roll over, obey in advance or acquire a taste for boot leather, and who are pushing back however ad whenever they can against the current White House resident’s illegal, unconstitutional and dictatorial assault on this country, its government, its citizens, and its standing on the global stage. Let’s boogie!

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