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Motown guitarist Dennis Coffey and American composer/arranger Luchi De Jesus scored the main theme for the 1974 martial arts blaxploitation film, Black Belt Jones starring Jim Kelly. Robert Clouse, who directed Bruce Lee’s Enter The Dragon, was the director of Black Belt Jones. Kelly and co-star Gloria Hendry, who later became a Bond girl, had great chemistry in the movie, which was one of the three most popular of its kind to feature martial arts. Tamara Dobson had starred in Cleopatra Jones a year earlier and Kelly was also cast in Three The Hard Way with Fred Williamson and Jim Brown which was also a 1974 release. The influence of those movies and the less popular ones that followed flowed into Motown’s The Last Dragon which became immediately popular after its 1985 debut and 2009’s Black Dynamite. The theme song to Black Belt Jones is recognized for its massive funk riffs that had great synchronicity with the film’s movement. In the rap world, the song was sampled by LL Cool J for  “Jingling Baby” and Lakim Shabazz used it in “Sample The Dope Noise.”
