Carl Douglas

Carl Douglas, the voice behind the disco-era novelty hit "Kung Fu Fighting," holds the distinction of being the first Jamaican-born performer to reach number one on the American singles chart. Raised partly in California and partly in Jamaica, he later relocated to England to pursue studies in sound engineering. There, in 1964, he assembled the Big Stampede, whose handful of U.K. singles appeared over the next two years. While residing in Spain he formed the Explosions in 1966; upon his return to England he joined forces with the band Gonzales, which soon led to session vocal work for Pye Records. In 1972 he collaborated with Indian-born producer Biddu on music for the Richard Roundtree film Embassy. Two years afterward, when Biddu required a singer for Larry Weiss’s song “I Want to Give You My Everything,” he again turned to Douglas. Pressed for a B-side, Biddu quickly fashioned a melody around lyrics Douglas had drafted about the martial-arts craze fueled by Bruce Lee’s Enter the Dragon and David Carradine’s television series Kung Fu. The resulting track, “Kung Fu Fighting,” was cut in a mere ten minutes; at Pye’s urging it became the single’s A-side. The record first topped the British charts, then climbed to number one in the United States and elsewhere, ultimately moving more than nine million copies worldwide. Pye hastily assembled an album mixing a few novelty numbers with straightforward soul and disco selections and issued it under the title Kung Fu Fighting and Other Great Love Songs. Its follow-up, “Dance the Kung Fu,” failed to chart in America and cemented Douglas’s reputation as a one-off novelty artist, yet it reached Britain’s Top 20, while “Run Back” entered the U.K. Top 30 in 1977. He issued two further albums—Love, Peace and Happiness in 1979, whose title track also hit the U.K. Top 30, and Keep Pleasing Me in 1983—before settling in Hamburg, Germany, where he operates a successful production company supplying music for films and advertising.