The Rayleigh beam is a perturbation of the Bernoulli-Euler beam. We establish convergence of the solution of the Exact Controllability Problem for the Rayleigh beam to the corresponding solution of the Bernoulli-Euler beam. Convergence is related to a Singular Perturbation Problem. The main tool in solving this perturbation problem is a weak version of a lower bound for hyperbolic polynomials.