Wood, Brass & Steel

American soul funk disco group which started out as The Ohio Hustlers, though Joe and Sylvia Robinson wrote them down as Wood, Brass & Steel when they recorded them for All Platinum. This was also the band which played on the Skull Snaps album. The band's guitarist Skip McDonald (real name Bernard Alexander) also taught at Jackie McLean's Artist Collective Inc. in Hartford Connecticut, where their drummer Harold Sargent also spent a lot of time and had a house. There they met Barton Campbell & Doug Wimbish, a duo that had been in a band called Organic Substance and who were taking classes. They all started a new band called Third World, but changed its name when the reggae act came to prominence. At this point they inherited the name Wood, Brass & Steel.

Their self-titled 1976 debut, released on the Turbo label, spawned a pair of minor hits, e.g. the Ronnie Laws cover Always There did well in the UK. In September 1979 Silvia Robinson called bassist Doug Wimbish, guitarist Skip McDonald and drummer Keith LeBlanc and made them members of the Sugarhill Gang Band, the in-house session musicians for the hip-hop label of the same name. WB&S released a final album there in 1980. In 1984 the trio met Adrian Sherwood at a music seminar in New York. They soon followed him to England, where they played on several Sherwood projects such as Fats Comet and Tackhead.