Shabazz Palaces’ Ishmael Butler first heard it when he was a kid in the mid-1970s: the woozy, apocalyptic funk of 24-Carat Black.

Butler’s father, a history professor, routinely brought home avant-jazz LPs of the day, exposing his son to Sun Ra and Pharoah Sanders before he was even old enough to read. Somewhere in his record collection was 24-Carat Black’s only studio release, a bleak concept album called Ghetto: Misfortune’s Wealth.

“When I was young, I heard the album a lot,” says Butler, who was once known as Butterfly from Digable Planets. “As I got older, my impression of it was, damn, this shit really is good—and really outside the normal approach to R&B.” Ghetto: Misfortune’s Wealth, released on Stax Records in 1973 and reissued just this year by Craft Recordings, paired hard grooves with unflinching soliloquies about black poverty and despair. The tracks were long, and, from Stax's view, not easily marketable. But for Butler, even the inky-black cover and band name seemed charged with meaning. “The name was always right to me: 24-Carat Black. That was a slick use of words and imagery that evoked something ancient, mysterious, dark, bright.”

The group’s name crystalized Ghetto producer and arranger Dale Warren’s theory of African-American culture as a neglected treasure. But for most people, 24-Carat Black’s name was a nonentity: Ghetto didn’t sell. “The concept of the album was before its time,” says singer Princess Hearn, who joined the group as a teenager and later married (then divorced) Warren. “It was too sophisticated,” theorizes Rob Sevier, co-founder of the archival label Numero Group, which released demos for 24-Carat Black’s incomplete second album in 2009 as Gone: The Promises of Yesterday. By the end of the ’70s, Stax had folded, the band had dissolved, and Ghetto: Misfortune’s Wealth had slid into bargain-bin obscurity.

Which is where it would have remained, if not for hip-hop. In 1992, Butler unearthed his dad’s 24-Carat Black LP and nabbed a drum sample from “Foodstamps” for Digable Planets’ jazz-rap classic “Rebirth of Slick (Cool Like Dat),” which would become the group’s biggest hit. Two years earlier, Eric B. & Rakim had used a vocal hook from the album’s title track to pump urgency into their song “In the Ghetto.” As rap producers began pillaging ’70s soul in search of dusty vibes and tight drum sounds, 24-Carat Black’s long-forgotten grooves became sample manna.

24-Carat Black’s name is still largely unknown today, yet its music continues to infiltrate A-level hip-hop records. The latest example appears on Pusha-T’s new album, the Kanye West–produced Daytona: The standout track, the Drake diss “Infrared,” spins dizzily around a disembodied vocal loop lifted from 24-Carat Black’s “I Want to Make Up,” which—like a number of recent Kanye samples—was first unearthed by Numero. And last year, Kendrick Lamar included a sample of “Poverty’s Paradise,” a 13-minute epic from Ghetto: Misfortune’s Wealth, on DAMN. Listen closely to the beginning of “FEAR.” and you’ll hear Hearn wailing, accompanied by stray lines from the original recording (“I been hungry all my life”).

The surviving members of 24-Carat Black have seen virtually no money from these samples, however. Throughout the reporting of this piece, the Numero Group began collecting paperwork to get the surviving members paid something, including clearance money from the Pusha sample. Ghetto: Misfortune’s Wealth has become a lost masterpiece examining poverty and inner-city hardship, yet its creators still feel the sting of past exploitation.

The story of 24-Carat Black begins at a frat party in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in the early ’70s. It was there that Dale Warren first caught sight of a young 12-piece soul outfit from Cincinnati called the Ditalians. The arranger, a conservatory-trained violinist and composer, saw “the fruition of his soul-suite vision on display before him,” writes Sevier in the liner notes for Gone.