Latimore, ‘Let’s Straighten It Out’ Singer and Blues Hall of Famer, Dies at 86

Latimore performs at the Nancy Jazz Pulsations festival in Nancy, France, on Oct. 22, 1983. The blues and R&B singer, songwriter and pianist, best known for the 1974 hit “Let’s Straighten It Out,” died Aug. 22, 2026, at 86. (Lioneldecoster/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0)

Latimore, the singer, songwriter and pianist whose conversational baritone turned a relationship talk into the 1974 R&B classic “Let’s Straighten It Out,” died Aug. 22 at 86.

Malaco Records, his longtime label, confirmed his death in a social-media statement.

“We are deeply saddened to hear of the passing of Benjamin ‘Benny’ Latimore,” the Jackson, Mississippi-based label wrote, offering condolences to his family and loved ones.

A cause of death has not been publicly disclosed.

Born Benjamin William Lattimore in Charleston, Tennessee, Latimore grew up listening to gospel, blues and country music. He began playing his family’s piano as a child and sang his first solo in a Baptist church at 13, according to Malaco’s biography of the singer. He eventually moved to Miami and began recording for music entrepreneur Henry Stone’s Dade label before moving to Stone’s Glades imprint.

His version of T-Bone Walker’s “Stormy Monday” reached No. 27 on Billboard’s R&B chart in 1973. A year later came the record that would define his career.

Written by Latimore, “Let’s Straighten It Out” reached No. 1 on the R&B chart and crossed over to No. 31 on the Billboard Hot 100. He followed it with more R&B hits, including “Keep the Home Fire Burnin’” and “Somethin’ ’Bout ’Cha.”

Latimore signed with Malaco in 1982, beginning another substantial chapter of his career.

The move also placed him in the middle of an important shift in Black music. As major labels increasingly moved away from veteran soul performers, Malaco built a durable business recording artists whose audiences had not disappeared, including Z.Z. Hill, Denise LaSalle, Johnnie Taylor, Little Milton and Latimore.

Latimore remained active well beyond his 1970s chart run. He played piano on Joss Stone’s 2003 debut, The Soul Sessions, and her 2004 follow-up, Mind Body & Soul. In 2014, he sat in with the Roots on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.”

The Blues Foundation inducted Latimore into the Blues Hall of Fame in 2017, recognizing a career that resisted an easy genre label.

Latimore himself put it more simply in a 2017 interview with Blues Blast Magazine.

“I can’t say that I’m a blues singer, but I’m a singer who can sing the blues.”

Rap Pioneer Keith Keith Dies at 64

Funky 4 + 1 performs “That’s the Joint” on “Saturday Night Live” on Feb. 14, 1981. Keith Caesar, known as Keith Keith, was 18 when the pioneering Bronx group made the landmark television appearance. Caesar died Aug. 21, 2026, at 64. (Screengrab/NBC)

Keith Keith was 18 years old when hip-hop walked onto “Saturday Night Live” for the first time.

He would turn 19 the next day.

On Feb. 14, 1981, Blondie singer Debbie Harry introduced Funky 4 + 1 as some of “the best street rappers in the country.” Then Keith Keith and his Bronx crew launched into “That’s the Joint,” passing the microphone through a performance that became one of early hip-hop’s defining crossings from neighborhood culture to national television.

Keith Caesar, the pioneering MC known as Keith Keith, died Friday, Aug. 21, at 64, his family told News 12 The Bronx.

His family said he died from medical complications. No further details were announced.

Caesar was a lifelong Bronx resident and one of the original voices of a group whose list of firsts can sound almost impossible in retrospect.

Funky 4 + 1 is widely credited as the first hip-hop group to secure a record deal. It featured Sha-Rock, one of the culture’s foundational female MCs. And when the group appeared on “Saturday Night Live,” it became the first hip-hop group to perform on the program and, according to contemporary histories and later accounts, the first authentic Bronx hip-hop crew to perform live on national television.

None of that was inevitable when Caesar started rhyming.

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Sha-Rock has recalled that when she became an MC in the late 1970s, Keith Keith and K.K. Rockwell were already the two male MCs in the organization that would become the Funky 4. Rahiem joined soon afterward, completing an early version of the group before lineup changes brought in performers including Lil’ Rodney C and Jazzy Jeff.

These were not artists entering an established recording industry called hip-hop.

The infrastructure barely existed.

Their stages were parks, community centers, clubs and neighborhood parties. Flyers preserved by institutions including Harvard’s Hiphop Archive and the Smithsonian now read almost like archaeological documents from a culture that would eventually reshape popular music.

Keith Keith’s name is on those documents.

By 1979, Funky 4 + 1 had moved from the live Bronx circuit onto vinyl with “Rappin’ and Rocking the House” on Bobby Robinson’s Enjoy Records. Caesar shares a writing credit on the sprawling early rap record.

The group later joined Sylvia Robinson’s Sugar Hill Records and recorded the song that would become its signature.

“That’s the Joint” was different from a modern rap single in nearly every obvious way.

The original performance stretched for roughly nine minutes. Instead of centering one star, the record operated like a recorded version of a Bronx MC routine: voices traded off, joined together and handed momentum from one rapper to another.

Caesar was one of its credited writers.

Its influence lasted far beyond the group.

A 1980 Bronx flyer advertises a Funky Four Plus One More appearance and names Keith Keith among the pioneering group’s MCs. Keith Caesar, known professionally as Keith Keith, died Aug. 21 at 64. The flyer is held by the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. (Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture/Public Domain)

Decades later, Rolling Stone placed “That’s the Joint” among its 500 greatest songs of all time. Its DNA also traveled directly into later generations of hip-hop. The Dust Brothers drew from it while constructing the Beastie Boys’ sample-heavy “Paul’s Boutique,” including material heard on “Shake Your Rump” and “Shadrach.” Positive K’s 1992 hit “I Got a Man” also drew from the record.

That afterlife helps explain why Funky 4 + 1 occupies a strange but essential place in hip-hop history: Millions of people know music shaped by the group without necessarily knowing the names of the teenagers who made the original.

Debbie Harry did.

Her decision to bring Funky 4 + 1 onto “Saturday Night Live” was not a celebrity stunt built around a passing musical curiosity.

Harry and Blondie guitarist Chris Stein had spent time around New York’s emerging hip-hop scene. Years later, Harry identified “That’s the Joint” with what she described as her hip-hop epiphany, recalling the impact of seeing DJs scratching and rappers performing at an event in the South Bronx.

When Harry hosted “Saturday Night Live” on Valentine’s Day 1981, she used part of the episode to put that music in front of a national audience.

Funky 4 + 1 took the stage.

For Caesar, the date carried an accidental bit of symmetry that becomes more striking now: He was born Feb. 15, 1962.

The kid helping introduce hip-hop to much of television America was performing on the final night of his 18th year.

Sha-Rock has said the group did not fully understand what it had accomplished at the time. They were already known around New York through performances and tapes circulating from neighborhood to neighborhood.

National television was something else.

Years later, she remembered what it meant to “have the entire world hear us rhyming.”

It is difficult to watch that performance now without seeing everything that came after it.

Run-DMC had not released a record. LL Cool J was still a child. “Yo! MTV Raps” was years away. There was no Grammy category for rap, no hip-hop radio format stretching across the country and no guarantee that the music being created in the Bronx would become a permanent part of American culture.

Keith Keith was already on the microphone.

The group’s recording career was relatively brief. Funky 4 + 1 never made the kind of studio-album catalog later generations would use to measure rap careers, and its members eventually moved in different directions.

But longevity is not the only way to measure importance.

Some artists dominate an era.

Others help create one.

Grandmaster Flash, another architect of the Bronx scene, responded to Caesar’s death by placing him firmly in the latter category.

In a Facebook tribute, Flash called Caesar “one of our originators from the beginning of the culture.” He said he had seen him recently and was stunned by the news.

“You will not be forgotten,” Flash said.

For Keith Keith, the historical record gives those words weight.

Before hip-hop became an industry, he was on the flyers.

Before rap television had a format, he was on national television.

And before the world knew where hip-hop was going, Keith Keith was already there.

Lil Durk Murder-for-Hire Trial Opens as Defense Blames Cooperating Witness for Quando Rondo Plot

Rapper Lil Durk, whose legal name is Durk Devontay Banks, is shown in an October 2024 booking photo following his arrest in Broward County, Fla. Banks has pleaded not guilty to federal charges stemming from an alleged murder-for-hire plot targeting rapper Quando Rondo in Los Angeles in 2022. (Broward Sheriff’s Office)

Lil Durk’s federal murder-for-hire trial opened with two sharply different explanations for a 2022 Los Angeles ambush that left one man dead.

Prosecutors told jurors Monday that the Grammy-winning Chicago rapper financed a revenge plot against Quando Rondo after the killing of King Von.

Durk’s defense says the government has the wrong mastermind.

Attorneys for the rapper, whose legal name is Durk Devontay Banks, instead pointed to former personal assistant Kavon Grant, one of three alleged co-conspirators who have pleaded guilty and agreed to cooperate with prosecutors.

“This is a case about revenge, stalking and premeditated murder,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Daniel H. Weiner told jurors, according to the *Los Angeles Times*.

Banks, 33, has pleaded not guilty.

The federal case centers on the Aug. 19, 2022, shooting outside a gas station near the Beverly Center in Los Angeles.

Prosecutors allege Banks wanted Tyquian Bowman, the Georgia rapper known professionally as Quando Rondo, killed in retaliation for the November 2020 death of Dayvon “King Von” Bennett.

Von was fatally shot following a confrontation outside an Atlanta nightclub involving members of Bowman’s entourage.

Nearly two years later, prosecutors say a group associated with Banks traveled from Chicago to Southern California, tracked Bowman and eventually attacked his vehicle.

Bowman survived.

His cousin, 24-year-old Saviay’a Robinson, was shot and killed.

In his opening statement Monday, Weiner portrayed Banks as the person who supplied both the motive and the resources behind the alleged plot.

“It was defendant Banks’ beef, it was defendant Banks’ money, it was defendant Banks’ hit men,” Weiner told the jury, according to the *Times*.

Banks was not at the scene of the shooting, a point his defense highlighted as it challenged the government’s attempt to connect him to the attack.

Attorney Marissa Goldberg told jurors that Grant — not Banks — arranged the operation.

According to the defense, Grant booked hotels, obtained vehicles and purchased ski masks before the shooting. Goldberg argued that Grant later implicated Banks after becoming a cooperating witness, giving prosecutors the celebrity defendant she described as a “big fish.”

“Mr. Banks had nothing to do with it,” Goldberg told jurors.

That dispute could become one of the trial’s defining questions.

Grant has pleaded guilty and is expected to testify for the government. So have Keith Jones and Kacey “OTF Jam” Hester, according to prosecutors.

Banks is being tried alongside Deondre Dontrell Wilson and David Brian Lindsey. Both men also deny the charges against them.

Federal prosecutors contend the group followed Bowman around Los Angeles before gunmen opened fire at the gas station. Robinson was struck several times and died from his injuries.

The defense is attacking not only the government’s cooperating witnesses but also one of the more culturally sensitive elements of the prosecution: Banks’ music.

Goldberg told jurors prosecutors are expected to introduce songs and lyrics while trying to establish Banks’ state of mind and connection to the alleged revenge plot.

She characterized the material as artistic expression rather than evidence of a murder agreement.

“This is art, this is performance,” Goldberg said.

Banks’ lawyers also say prosecutors cannot show that he actually paid or promised to pay anyone for Robinson’s killing.

“There is no money to follow,” Goldberg told the jury.

The distinction matters because prosecutors are asking jurors to find that Banks was not merely angry about Von’s death or acquainted with people who committed the shooting, but that he knowingly participated in an agreement to have Bowman killed.

The government says financial and logistical evidence, communications and testimony from cooperating defendants will establish that connection.

The defense says those same cooperating witnesses have powerful reasons to shift responsibility toward Banks as they await sentencing.

Banks’ music career adds an unusual backdrop to the proceedings.

He won his first Grammy in 2024 for “All My Life,” his collaboration with J. Cole, taking home the award for best melodic rap performance. He is also the founder of Only the Family, commonly known as OTF.

The trial does not include every allegation federal prosecutors have made against Banks.

A federal grand jury added separate racketeering-related allegations this summer involving other alleged violence in Chicago and Atlanta. Judge Michael W. Fitzgerald ordered those counts tried separately, keeping the current proceeding focused on the Los Angeles case.

Those allegations remain unresolved and are not evidence of Banks’ guilt in the trial now before jurors.

Banks has remained in federal custody since his October 2024 arrest in South Florida.

Monday’s opening statements were only the beginning of what is expected to be a closely watched trial built around competing interpretations of the same relationships, communications and witnesses.

Prosecutors say Banks used his money and influence to turn grief over King Von’s death into a murder plot.

His lawyers say the people who actually organized the attack are now trying to save themselves by putting Lil Durk at the center of it.