Production Breakdown - Lil Wayne’s “Six Foot Seven Foot”

I know what you're thinking: “How the hell is Richard going to top his recently concluded, track-by-track breakdown of Kanye's My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy?” At least, I know I've been thinking that. Plus, I figured I'd work one last plug in there.

Rather than even trying to top that monstrosity, though, I'm gonna revisit a record I missed amidst all the Kanye fervor, but whose instrumental made me scratch my head when it hit DJBooth.net back in December. That's right: I'm talking about “6 Foot 7 Foot,” the Bangladesh-produced lead single off Lil Wayne's eagerly-anticipated Tha Carter IV LP.



The record itself is an eminently fresh effort, though I don't feel it quite measures up to the inspired insanity of “A Milli” – questions of originality aside, I prefer Weezy at his most bizarre, and his free-associated imagery and surrealistic wordplay on the Carter III joint satisfied my craving for weirdness like none other. But that's neither here nor there, right? The question I'm concerned with today is... what's the deal with that sample? The idea of Wayne having “A Milli”on dollars is a straightforward one, but the connection between tallness, bananas, and all the stuff Tunechi and guiest Cory Gunz are rhyming about... well, that's a little less clear. In my researches, however, I've discovered the Rosetta Stone that ties it all together.

OK, not really. But the stuff I learned is pretty interesting nonetheless.

As you may already know, “6 Foot” owes its central sample to calypso singer Harry Belafonte's “Day-O,” more commonly known as “The Banana Boat Song.” Released in 1956, the single was Belafonte's greatest success, climbing to #5 on the U.S. Billboard charts. The incomprehnsible looped portion behind the verses is drawn from 0:38, while the tiitular “Six foot, seven foot, eight foot – bunch!”” is taken from 1:02.



It's one of those classic songs that everyone's heard, but few stop and wonder what it's about; a glance at the lyrics, however, reveals that the song is delivered from the point of view of Jamaican dockworkers on the night shift, loading bananas onto cargo ships. As the sun peeks over the horizon, they become anxious for “Mr. Tally Mon” to to tally up their work so they can go home and drink some rum. Simple enough, right?

If that sounds like something Harry Belafonte wouldn't have come up with all on his own, well, that's because it's not. His hit version of the song is based on “Day Da Light,” a folk tune sung by said Jamaican dockworkers to stave off the boredom of hauling bananas all damn night. Nor was Belafonte first to record his rendition of the record – that honor goes to Trinidadian-born, UK-bred calypso pioneer Edric Connor, who released this version of the song in 1952.



Interestingly, this version's arrangement is much more fleshed out than Belafonte's later single, with Edric even providing a tuneful piano accompaniment.

Jamaican singer/writer/educator Louise Bennett takes a more stripped-down, perhaps more historically authentic approach in this rendition, released two years later in '54.



Anyway, there are about a zillion other versions of the song on YouTube alone, so those who want to go bananas and track down every cover ever made, you probably don't need my help to do so.

One thing careful listeners may have noticed about both Edric Connor and Louise Bennett's renditions, though, is that the “Six foot, seven foot, eight foot...” line that inspired Wayne's song is nowhere to be found. In its place, instead, is the line “Six han' seven han' eight han' – bunch!” Thus, either Belafonte or the lyricists who helped him adapt the song seem to have switched things up. But why “foot” instead of “han'”?

Actually, Belafonte did use the “han'” version at one point, as shown in this (presumably earlier) performance of his version.



My only guess is that, taking “han'” to mean “hand,” he couldn't make sense of the line – from there, it's just a hop, skip and a jump to “foot.” Which also happens to tally (no pun intended) with a previous line added for Belafonte's version, “Stack bananas till the morning comes.” Fair enough, I guess – they've got a really tall stack of banana crates.

Personally, though, I suspected there was a little bit of a misunderstanding going on, and a Google search backed me up; turns out that, in Jamaican patois, “han'” can mean not only “hand” but also “and,” as in this example, randomly grabbed from here:

“A done call Air-Jamaica ... book han pay fe me flight aready. Mama, bwile han set some sorrel noh... han bake a black-cake fe me...”

So, there you go: neither hands nor feet, nor tallness for that matter, had anything to do with it. It's just a generic counting chant intended to represent the boss tallying their work, and possibly to provide a rhythmic accompaniment to their labors.

As for Wayne, well, I guess he's just a really hard worker. And he probably likes rum, too - I mean, who doesn't?