Ram Jam — Black Betty

JUL 01 1977 · 12:00

Ram Jam — Black Betty (1977) Era: Classic Rock / Pre-MTV Promo Era (1977) - Shot during the peak of album-oriented rock's commercial ascent, before music video became a mainstream distribution format; promotional clip produced to support a Top 20 US and Top 10 UK single. High. This is one of the few surviving performance promo clips from 1977 pre-dating MTV's standardization of the music video format. Its combination of documented chart success, cultural controversy, deep folk-music heritage, and anomalous production history — a band performing to a recording they did not make — gives it exceptional value as both a music industry artifact and a document of late-1970s rock visual culture. The warm, tungsten-lit film aesthetic and fast rhythmic cutting serve as a benchmark reference for the era's promotional film grammar. Context: Released in June 1977, Ram Jam's 'Black Betty' promo clip arrived years before MTV launched (1981), making it a rare surviving artifact of the pre-cable promotional film era. Producers Jerry Kasenetz and Jeffry Katz — veterans of the bubblegum pop scene who had worked with the Ohio Express and 1910 Fruitgum Company — assembled Ram Jam around guitarist Bill Bartlett and re-released a recording originally made by Bartlett's prior band Starstruck. The song's trajectory from African-American prison work song first documented by John and Alan Lomax in 1933, through Lead Belly's 1939 recording, to a hard rock hit represents one of American music's most layered cross-cultural transmission stories. The single peaked at #18 on the US Billboard Hot 100 and reached the UK top ten, while also generating civil rights controversy, with the NAACP and Congress of Racial Equality calling for a boycott over the lyrics. Director notes: The IMDB entry (tt10066620) lists the video as a 1977 music video with cast members Bill Bartlett, Howard Arthur Blauvelt, and Pete Charles appearing on screen, but carries no director credit. Per a Louder Sound feature, Bill Bartlett himself noted that 'the band in the video was not the band playing' — the recording was originally made by Starstruck, though the Ram Jam lineup appeared in the promo clip. The video was released in June 1977 to accompany the Epic Records single, which entered the Billboard Hot 100 on June 5, 1977.