Her first big hit, “Girls Can’t Do What the Guys Do,” came out two years later it contains the lines “Girls, you can’t do / what the guys do / and still be a lady.” It will sound familiar to anyone who has heard the Beyoncé and Jay Z song “Upgrade U,” which samples it.īut back to that phone call: “Khaled is like my son,” Wright said, which is why she answered, despite the late hour. Later, at the age of twelve, she was discovered by a pair of songwriters and producers, who heard her humming a song at a record store. Wright herself has been playing in the sandbox since she was two years old, when she joined her mother and siblings in a gospel group called Echoes of Joy. I ain’t trying to be in their sandbox-I built the sandbox, but I watch ’em play in it.” “You know, they are somebody’s children, and I’m somebody’s momma,” Wright said. Sometimes, when there is tension between the artists whom she keeps under her wing, she serves as a mediator. “We are all very, very close,” she said of her Miami rap friends, and a few of their moms. Though she is remembered around the world for two singles, “Clean Up Woman” and “Tonight Is the Night,” both now more than thirty years old, Wright has quietly conjured a second act as a confidante, muse, and teacher to some of the world’s best-known hip-hop artists. Wright is close with other rappers, too: a few years back, she recorded an album with the Roots, and in 2001 she helped Trick Daddy, whom she has also known forever, wrangle a chorus of schoolchildren to sing the hook on his single “I’m a Thug.” Khaled is also one of Betty Wright’s best friends in town, along with Puff Daddy, whose New Year’s Eve party she never misses, and Lil Wayne, whom she’s known since he was fifteen and whom she trained in the art of breathing, phrasing, and pitch. On the line was DJ Khaled, the Miami-based hip-hop impresario, who is responsible for some of the biggest hip-hop hits in recent memory. But, when her phone rang, she answered it. “I was saying, Boy, if I could just get up those steps, get in my bed-I’m not even taking a bath till the morning,” Wright, who is sixty years old, said in an interview on a recent Sunday afternoon, not long after getting home from church.
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