Lil Wayne is a rapper first and foremost, but he decided to test himself by picking up the guitar during the mid-2000s. His first taste of the instrument was during the video shoot for ‘Leather So Soft’, his Birdman collaboration from 2006’s Like Father, Like Son album.
However, you might be surprised that Betty Wright, the late soul icon behind hits like ‘Clean Up Woman’ and ‘Tonight Is the Night,’ taught him how to play the guitar. The Miami singer was on the set of his video with Baby and showed him the basics.
“She said, ‘Look at your fingers. Baby, I know what I’m talking about. You’re a guitar player. You won’t ever need nothing but those two fingers,’” he recalled Wright telling him during a conversation with Rolling Stone. The rest is history, with Wayne releasing a whole rap rock album in the form of Rebirth in 2010. He even played the bass guitar in the song ‘Da Da Da’.
Wayne collaborated with Betty Wright in 2007 on ‘Playing with Fire’, which appeared on the original version of Tha Carter III. Then, Abkco Music Inc. filed a lawsuit against Wayne, alleging copyright infringement and unfair competition. The label claimed the song derived from The Rolling Stones’ ‘Play with Fire’, forcing Wayne to completely remove it from the project.
In the song, Wright sings, “So you’ve got so many diamonds/ You wear all the finest clothes/ And your grill is shining/ As you’re driving down the streets of gold/ But you can’t blame me/ If I set this stage on fire.”
Wayne once described Wright as a mother figure, paying tribute following her death in 2020. “Ms Betty was like a mom,” he told Variety. “I became a fan as a kid because my mom would listen to her shit loud as fuck in the crib while she’d be getting dressed. What stuck out was the talking on the records that Ms B would so famously do.
“Another interesting and consistent fact about it all is that whoever played her songs knew every word of the talking part! As a kid, you’d have to sit there and have them try to act like Ms B and talk to you like that. It obviously stuck with me. I met her when I moved to Miami, she was nothing but a mother ever since. Not only to me but my friends and my daughter as well.”
He added, “She’s more than missed by myself and a world of others. I have a lot to thank her for but I thank her most for my musical confidence! I can do anything.”
On another occasion, he praised the classic ‘Tonight is the Night’, telling personal memories about the record. “There’s eras of the song in my life, the first is being in the backseat of a car,” he told TV One. “Your mom’s singing it and you’re singing right along with her. The second is you’re riding in that car alone and now you find those words meaning something totally different than what they meant when you were sitting in that backseat.”
