Bar-Red Entertainment Group (BREG)

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Snoop Dogg's Do******le was built on a song a teenager wrote, and that teenager was Bernard Wright. 2Pac sampled him, Skee-Lo sampled him, Dr. Dre and LL Cool J sampled him, hit after hit after hit. Wright made the sound that the whole decade danced to.

You never once had to learn his name.Somewhere in Jamaica, Queens, in the late 1970s, a teenager made up a word.

Haboglabotribin'. It did not mean anything in any language. It was the name he gave to an amusement park that existed only inside his own head, a place where every ride cost fifty cents and nobody could think of a single reason to go home.

That teenager was Bernard Wright. He put the word into a song, the song went out into the world, and the word ended up outliving almost everything else about him.

You have heard it. If you played Do******le until the tape stretched thin, you have heard it, because Snoop Dogg built "Gz & Hustlas" right on top of it. If you came up on 2Pac, it is in there too. If you ever rode around with Skee-Lo's "I Wish" turned all the way up, that was Bernard again, a different song of his called "Spinnin'" holding the whole thing down underneath the rap.

His hands are on more records than most people will ever own. His name is on almost none of them.

This is the story of the man who made that sound.

He was a Queens kid, born in November of 1963, raised mostly by his grandmother in the Jamaica section of the borough, where the music never really stopped. James Brown lived in that part of town. So did the great jazz drummer Roy Haynes. The basements had keyboards in them, and the older men who played did not chase the neighborhood children away.

By the time he was five, Bernard had found the keyboard. By ten he was already playing out, with a little outfit called the Junior Firebolts, opening for the grown Firebolts at local gigs. He was a small boy in rooms full of working musicians, and he was holding his own.

The men of that neighborhood took him in and taught him. Weldon Irvine, the poet and keyboard player everyone called Master Wel, ran a band that half of musical Queens passed through, and he showed Bernard that jazz and funk were not two separate things but one thing played with two hands. Don Blackman taught him too. None of them treated the boy like a mascot. They treated him like somebody who was going to matter.

Then the drummer Lenny White came looking for him.

White was already a serious name by then. He had recorded with Miles Davis and played in Return to Forever, and now he was building a new band with a young bass player named Marcus Miller. He had heard there was a keyboard player in the neighborhood doing things that should not have been possible at his age. When White found out the keyboard player was twelve years old, he did not laugh it off and walk away. He went to the house.

He sat down in the living room with Bernard's grandmother and asked her, plainly, to let her twelve-year-old grandson go out on the road with a band of grown men. She studied him for a while. She decided he was telling the truth, and she said yes. Years later White still spoke about that moment the way a person speaks about something they were trusted with. He was a genius, White said. He had to go and speak to the grandmother himself, and she trusted him enough to do it.

So Bernard Wright went out on the road at twelve, and in a real sense he never came all the way back off it.

At sixteen he was playing with the trumpeter Tom Browne, and his keyboard is right there inside "Funkin' for Jamaica," the record that went to number one on the R&B chart and turned the name of their whole borough into a hook. He was a teenager, and he was already on a number one song.

GRP Records signed him when he was seventeen. In 1981 they released his first album and named it 'Nard, because that was what everybody who knew him called him. He was still a teenager, just out of high school. Marcus Miller played bass on it. A young singer named Luther Vandross, years before the world would know exactly who Luther Vandross was, sang behind him.

And there on that album sat the made-up word. "Haboglabotribin'," bright and churning and joyful, a song about a wonderland with a Tilt-a-Whirl and a Wonder Wheel, sung by a kid who still half believed that places like that were real. The album climbed to number seven on the jazz chart. People who paid attention started saying his name with a particular kind of respect, the kind you save for someone you expect to be around for the next forty years.

Here is the part that should have made him rich and famous, and did neither.

About ten years after that first album, hip-hop went digging through the old crates for sounds with real soul buried in them, and again and again it came up holding Bernard Wright. Snoop took "Haboglabotribin'" for Do******le, the best-selling debut album any rapper had ever released. 2Pac reached for it. Skee-Lo built "I Wish" on the bones of "Spinnin'." His third album had given the world "Who Do You Love," a song that went top ten R&B all on its own back in 1985, and then that song got sampled too, by LL Cool J, by Dr. Dre, by Big Pun, by the Luniz, over and over, a song other artists kept turning into hits.

He had made the sound the decade was built on. He was not on the cover of any of those records, and the money a sample pays a man is not the money a hit pays a man.

In the 1990s he turned toward gospel and made a run of albums that nobody sampled, Fresh Hymns and the ones that followed, music he made for an entirely different reason. And then he left New York for good. He married a woman from Texas and moved to Dallas, and that is where the last chapter of his life, and maybe the truest one, actually happened.

In Dallas, Bernard Wright became a teacher.

Not in a school building. In rehearsal rooms and on bandstands and in living rooms, with a whole generation of young Texas musicians who grew up around him and started calling him Unc Nard. Sometime in the 2000s a Dallas radio station, KNON, sat him down and asked him about his life, and he talked mostly about them. There is a very serious community of musicians here in town, he said. They respect me as a teacher, and I respect them as students. He kept going. There is a point, he said, where the student becomes the teacher. The next generation feels me, and I'm really happy about that, man. Because I'm feeling them too.

That was a man who had been on number one records as a teenager, telling you in his own plain words that the thing he was proudest of was a room full of young people learning his sound.

One of those musicians was a bass player named Wade Campbell. The first time Bernard came around to jam, he picked up Campbell's bass and started playing it loud, loud enough that Campbell got nervous about his speaker and reached over and switched the amp off. Bernard turned it back on. Campbell turned it off. Bernard turned it back on.

It became a thing between them. Every single time Bernard came through to play, he went straight for that same instrument, Campbell's signature Marcus Miller bass, and Campbell could not work out why until the day he watched old footage of Bernard and the real Marcus Miller, his friend from the Queens days, playing side by side. That bass was a door back to where he started.

They grew close. They spent a few months out on the road together, and Campbell would say afterward that he learned more in those months than in all his years studying music at a university.

His sound did not stop with him. It went into a Dallas band called The Funky Knuckles. It went into Snarky Puppy. It went into a Dallas pianist named Caleb Sean McCampbell, who spent uncounted hours bent over a synthesizer copying every move Bernard made, trying to get a keyboard to sing the way Bernard could make one sing. The last real conversation the two of them had, Bernard told him something McCampbell would repeat to the whole world a year and a half later. Nephew, I'm extremely proud of you, he said. You sound the most like me out of all my students. You're really keeping my legacy alive.

The last person to truly talk with him was Wade Campbell, about forty-eight hours before the end. Bernard came walking up the street, and he was talking about death, and heaven, and God. He told Campbell he was looking forward to the streets of gold, and that the gold up there was pure because it had been purged in fire. He asked Campbell for a cigarette. Campbell did not have one to give him. So Bernard said goodnight and walked off into the dark.

Two days later, on May 19, 2022, Bernard Wright was crossing a street in Dallas when he was hit by a car. He was fifty-eight years old. There had been no long illness and no warning, just a man crossing a road on an ordinary day, and then the phone calls going out, one after another, to everyone who had loved him.

Roberta Flack, his godmother, the woman he had once served as music director, said her godson had passed suddenly, that she had believed deeply in his talent, and that losing him broke her heart. Lenny White, the same man who had once sat in that grandmother's living room, posted an old photograph of the two of them and made a promise out loud. If there are people who never knew who you were, White wrote, then leave that to me. I will let them all know who you are.

So here is who he was.

He was the twelve-year-old a grandmother decided to trust to the world. He was the teenager whose keyboard is buried deep inside records you have loved your entire life without knowing he was in there. He was Unc Nard, who could have spent his last years chasing back the fame his sound kept earning for other people, and instead spent them in Dallas rooms making certain his music would keep living in other people's hands after he was gone.

And underneath all of it, he was the kid who once made up a word for a wonderland that did not exist, a place where the rides were cheap and the joy never ran out and nobody had a single reason to leave. He sang about that place when he was a teenager. He spent his last night on earth talking about a different one, with streets of gold, just up ahead of him.

The word he invented is still playing. Somewhere right now, on a hip-hop record or a video game station or somebody's worn-out tape, a sound that began in a Queens basement is still going strong. Haboglabotribin'. Bernard Wright is the one who built it.

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NOTE: This post is shared for historical and educational awareness about Bernard Wright and the Black musicians who shaped American music, not to glorify violence, hate, or harm.

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