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Very early rap music

"Convoy" by C. W. McCall. Number one fifty years ago. A butch song for truckers, the DJ said. Next he played "Sixteen Tons", a butch record for miners which sold a million copies faster than any before or since.
 
I think you guys are confusing 'rap' with 'spoken word'.

Rap has a heavy rhyming component with accompanying beat. Spoken Word is just that, but with a musical background.

I don't think either example by Chimp would qualify as rap, early or otherwise. A perfect example of spoken word would be Old Rivers by Walter Brennan.
 
I was thinking about the way he was talking at the start of "Convoy".

I didn't mean to include "Sixteen Tons" as an example, but I was stating what the DJ was doing.
 
While it may not be 1920's Blues, or C.W. McCall (who ain't a rapper of any type, BTW) I submit, for the collective, an early rap artist who, if not for a horrible accident that took away his vocal chords, would have been bigger than Ice Cube, B.I.G., Tupac, Eminem, or any of them.

I present to you the greatest flow ever to be spit in a lyric, from Dallas-Oak Cliff, The D.O.C..

 
johnbasalla said:
This sounds like just fast talking to me. It doesn't have the beat of Rap.
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The beat came later.

I've always cited Bob Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues" as an early forerunner of rap:


If you want to hear it as 80s-90s-era rap, just imagine it with rhythm instead of instrumentation and change the downbeat to the five (in bold):

"Johnny's in the basement, mixin' up the medicine
I'm on the pavement, thinkin' 'bout the government
The man in a trench coat, badge out, laid off
Says he's got a bad cough, wants to get it paid off"
 
Just a thought ... wouldn't it be more likely that the first rap recording came from Africa? Surely an African-American genre like rap must have had its antecedents in Africa, not Appalachia or Oklahoma or Hibbing, Minnesota, right? Are there any early records of proto-rap by Africans in indigenous languages?
 
CTListener said:
Just a thought ... wouldn't it be more likely that the first rap recording came from Africa? Surely an African-American genre like rap must have had its antecedents in Africa, not Appalachia or Oklahoma or Hibbing, Minnesota, right? Are there any early records of proto-rap by Africans in indigenous languages?
Click to expand...

CNN did exactly such a piece for the 50th anniversary of hip-hop a couple of years back:

 
Another one for your consideration:

Every Christmas, we hear the novelty tune "The Christmas Song" by David Seville and the Chipmunks. Buried on the album is a version of "The Night Before Christmas." Keep in mind this is 1962:

 


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