Proto-rap recordings?

Subject: Proto-rap recordings?
From: Jack Campin
Date: 21 Oct 19 - 07:57 AM

When I arrived in Pittsburgh in 1974, you would occasionally see black guys standing around on street corners playing mbiras and improvising a fast, tightly rhymed, rhythmic spoken routine over them. I'd never heard anything like it (except calypso, which only had a vague resemblance) and thought it was gobsmackingly clever. It must have been a deliberate statement of African-ness - tended to go along with wearing a dashiki. Amplified several zillion times and commercialized, it was what later became hip-hop or rap. I can't remember what people called it back then.

Was anybody around to record that very early acoustic street rapping?

Subject: RE: Proto-rap recordings?
From: GUEST,matt milton
Date: 21 Oct 19 - 09:44 AM

I doubt if it's exactly what you're referring to (can't recall any mbiras being involved), but I'm sure Smithsonian Folkways have a few albums of recordings of African American rhythmic spoken stuff from the 70s that would come close.

Subject: RE: Proto-rap recordings?
From: GUEST,Phil d'Conch
Date: 21 Oct 19 - 10:56 AM

Standard model "proto-rap" would be Jamaican "toasting" however, it is somewhat less Afrocentric in a pan-Caribbean reality. eg: Lyr Add: Canopus is a Euro-American goombay (Bahamian) style toast. Old style forebitters - not all that much different.

Coxsone Dodd
Deejay (Jamaican)(Toasting)
U-Roy (Ewart Beckford OD)
King Stitt (Winston Sparkes)

Subject: RE: Proto-rap recordings?
From: Vic Smith
Date: 21 Oct 19 - 12:34 PM

Yes, I recall recordings of West Africans chanting rhymes to thumb pianos - if by that is you mean by m'bira because that word is also used for a form of balafon/xylophone. In fact there are still older buskers playing thumb pianos in more touristy area of The Gambia and Senegal, though usually it is just the instrument with a gourd as a sound box played instrumentally. Some of the older Manding jalis with include rap like passages in the midst of their singing to kora of balafon.
In fact, I think there is a stronger case for saying that rap came directly from Africa then the blues did.

Subject: RE: Proto-rap recordings?
From: Cool Beans
Date: 21 Oct 19 - 03:21 PM

Jocko Henderson, New York radio deejay in the 1950s, hosted "Jocko's Rocket Ship." His trademark was talking in rhyme. Listen here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_m0T6vRZTg

Subject: RE: Proto-rap recordings?
From: GUEST,RA
Date: 22 Oct 19 - 05:06 AM

The dozens?

Subject: RE: Proto-rap recordings?
From: GUEST,Jack Campin
Date: 22 Oct 19 - 05:58 AM

I was hoping somebody might have made field recordings of the ACTUAL kind of performance I heard then, not something that sounded vaguely like it and might have been historically connected but from another time and place. I would assume that the same sort of performance was going on in the street in Cleveland, Baltimore, Detroit, Philadelphia... wasn't anybody taping or filming?

Subject: RE: Proto-rap recordings?
From: GUEST,Phil d'Conch
Date: 22 Oct 19 - 08:53 AM

Hmmm, North American rap music has a generally accepted history. If it's the thread title you're looking for, the Sir Coxsone catalog is the place to start.

No idea what you heard in 1974 but, if Dodd et al are:

"...something that sounded vaguely like it and might have been historically connected but from another time and place."

Then:
"Amplified several zillion times and commercialized, it was what later became hip-hop or rap."

becomes a contradictory, if not extraordinary, claim with nothing for a source.

Subject: RE: Proto-rap recordings?
From: Jack Campin
Date: 22 Oct 19 - 09:07 AM

Could Caribbean styles of performance really have been ancestral to something done as a non-commercial folk idiom a bit later in Pittsburgh? (I heard ska at the time - nothing like as verbally elaborate, and it needed electricity).

Subject: RE: Proto-rap recordings?
From: Acorn4
Date: 22 Oct 19 - 12:06 PM

Could talking blues be seen as a kind of rap?

Subject: RE: Proto-rap recordings?
From: GUEST,Phil d'Conch
Date: 24 Oct 19 - 01:13 AM

Jack: Caribbean-to-Pittsburgh.

No idea as to what you heard in Pittsburgh. Same-same its connection to the thread title. Taking the commercialism and amplification out of hip-hop is like taking the H and the O out of water.

Retail vinyl didn't sound that good on high-wattage analog kit; problems with the moving geometries of the record groove and stylus (needle.) It's the same for large venue disco, funk, salsa &c. Stereo is another problem altogether.

The Southern lot do get around though. Sir Coxsone's work, begun in the 1950s, is the forerunner of the modern 45rpm twelve-inch single and turntablism.

Island Records started in Jamaica in 1959 as an urban dance hall-mento label. 1ea.: Englishman; Australian; Chinese-Jamaican and American. The first time the team moved the charts off-island was Millie Small's '64 cover of My Boy Lollipop. Not exactly gangsta rap... or folk.

Subject: RE: Proto-rap recordings?
From: GUEST,Phil d'Conch
Date: 24 Oct 19 - 01:22 AM

Acorn4: Talking blues.

Related maybe, but not the same thing.

Also not the same:
Zimbabwe Auction Floors
Tom Waits- Step Right Up

Subject: RE: Proto-rap recordings?
From: Cool Beans
Date: 24 Oct 19 - 03:07 PM

Gil Scott-Heron's 1971 LP "Pieces of a Man" was early hip-hop. Here's "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QnJFhuOWgXg

Subject: RE: Proto-rap recordings?
From: Gibb Sahib
Date: 26 Oct 19 - 04:25 AM

"Jim Crow," 1830s. Read Cockrell's _Demons of Disorder_
https://books.google.com/books?id=CKXeY0JcgDUC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false

Subject: RE: Proto-rap recordings?
From: Jack Campin
Date: 26 Oct 19 - 07:02 AM

Yeah, Gil Scott-Heron was great. But not exactly street-corner music making.

Come to think of it, black people in Brixton did spontaneous street performances (not exactly busking) when I moved there briefly in 1976. Not the same kind of music/poetry though.

This seems to be a rather large hole in the folk collecting enterprise. If you were a black singer in either Britain or the US, did you have to either be a paid professional with access to a recording studio or else live in a hovel picturesque enough for an ethnomusicologist to come visiting before anybody would notice your existence?

Subject: RE: Proto-rap recordings?
From: GUEST,Neil D
Date: 26 Oct 19 - 12:09 PM

Anything like the spoken word sections of this .

Subject: RE: Proto-rap recordings?
From: Gibb Sahib
Date: 27 Oct 19 - 05:44 AM

Jack,

Exactly what you're getting at is not clear, because it's not possible to infer accurately what salient characteristic of rap you want the antecedent to have... unless you tell us.

I've guessed you're leaving non-voice parts out of the equation.
I'm guessing you're focused on the sound object, but I don't know what other aspects are important to your definition.

I suggest the possibility that if you're concluding the thing you're looking for is not there, then maybe you're looking for the wrong thing.

Rap as a verse form and as a cultural practice has extensive roots in America.

In my work on THE chanty GENRE (the capitalized words being very deliberate), I map the continuities in the verse forms between many different practices connected in some way with African-Americans. The versification is improvisatory or otherwise a display of personal wit or otherwise is manufactured to mimic those qualities. It gives status to the versifier as a "man of words" (Roger Abrahams' phrase for calypsonians). Identical forms are found among people singing to their group-labor at such 18th-19th century tasks as rowing boats, shucking corn, pumping a fire engine, hauling a halyard, etc. The same goes for dance and for games/play. It is the verse of hand-clapping games. It's the verse for military jodies. It's in the free poetry of Rudy Ray Moore. (I agree -- it's not there in Gil Scott Heron.) It's the verse of the minstrel songs that closely follow African American style and gets locked in as a popular style, to recur in the descendants like blues, rock and roll, and country. And so with rap, in the beginning, when rap was conservative in style. Hip hop was new in the sense these verses were recited over funk music, looped. The spectacular commercial success thrust this versification of a quite old fashioned, nursery-rhyme-y sort, back into the spotlight. The Rock critics pissed on it because the artsy values they had developed by that time made the old timey black American versification sound simplistic and regressive. That didn't stop rap from resonating with a huge percentage of Americans who have this in their national DNA. (Same goes for "Old Town Road" this past year.)

It's all there. I don't know what "folk collecting" has to do with it. "Folk" ideology rejects or has a huge blind spot when it comes to popular music, which is what most of this stuff is. So yes, it hasn't entered into the historical record so much through that lens. (I must object however to your implied linkage of "folk collecting" and ethnomusicologists. As an ethnomusicologist myself, my field's mandate to study "music as culture" -- a musical anthropology -- was set since the 1950s when the term ethnomusicology was adopted, and it's not about "collecting." )

I consider the chanty genre to be an antecedent of rap. But see, one has to recognize the actual verse forms, the use of language, the social gestures of performers, the cultural lineages of the chanters. People graft their impression of SEA SONGS onto "chanty" and the picture gets cluttered with a bunch of irrelevant sea-related nonsense. Similarly, when rap becomes "speech like music" (or whatever, you get people piling on whatever speech-y thing is in their frame of reference. Same goes for "jazz," ugh! How many times have I seen someone mention that a music tradition involves players improvising and an audience member goes "Ah yes, like jazz!" (No, dude, like the majority of musics that involve improv and have nothing to do with jazz!)

sorry for the rant. Easy in the morning. Take care! ~G

Subject: RE: Proto-rap recordings?
From: GUEST,Passerby
Date: 28 Oct 19 - 08:09 AM

The invention of rap here:

Subject: RE: Proto-rap recordings?
From: GUEST,Passerby again
Date: 28 Oct 19 - 08:11 AM

https://youtu.be/E7WeuHGPqw8

Subject: RE: Proto-rap recordings?
From: Jack Campin
Date: 28 Oct 19 - 10:03 AM

I'm guessing you're focused on the sound object, but I don't know what other aspects are important to your definition.

Fast improvised rhymed verse with a light accompaniment texture (usually mbira), done by one performer. Performed in public in the American urban north-east in the 1970s but not to a paying audience. That clear enough?

I imagine you'd have heard it in private parties as well but I didn't encounter it there. Calypso/toasting is the closest thing I've heard but but it isn't quite as fast and spontaneous and uses a more conventional backing.

It looks like nobody bothered to record or film in the sort of situations I'm talking about so I'll never have anything I can point to.


As an ethnomusicologist myself, my field's mandate to study "music as culture" -- a musical anthropology -- was set since the 1950s when the term ethnomusicology was adopted, and it's not about "collecting." )

Brenna MacCrimmon calls herself an ethnomusicologist and she certainly does collecting.

Subject: RE: Proto-rap recordings?
From: Stringsinger
Date: 28 Oct 19 - 12:40 PM

The father of rap, I believe, is Fela Anikapalu Kouti from Nigeria.

Rap is an urban folk protest music that has been co-opted by the commercial music industry.

It's African roots have been firmly established back to the Griots.

Subject: RE: Proto-rap recordings?
From: GUEST,Cj
Date: 28 Oct 19 - 03:06 PM

Has the OP Jack Campin heard the Last Poets? This, from 1970

https://youtu.be/e3uDcIo12TE 

Subject: RE: Proto-rap recordings?
From: GUEST,Phil d'Conch
Date: 28 Oct 19 - 07:09 PM

More here: Toasts, & Other Roots of Rap

Griot: Is an African tradition/word that's neither… African… nor traditional. It's a post-middle passage, Latin label with no Pan-American, nor African, usage or definition that I'm aware of. Certainly not one that covers everything from bard to boatswain. On some islands it's a dirty word and not about music at all.

Toasting, calypso and Ali's riffs were more akin to bàkk & kaiso style fronting.

Actual, practical, antiphonal, physics oriented nauticus cantus or cane cutting would be more like gritador (shouter) back where I come from.

IMNSHO, 19th Anglo-American pop entertainment did about as well with African and Irish-Americans as it's 20th century Beverly Hillbillies did with its rural peoples. Based on a true story, P.T. Barnum style.