Rapping can be traced back to its African roots. Centuries before hip-hop music existed, the griots of West Africa were delivering stories rhythmically, over drums and sparse instrumentation. Such connections have been acknowledged by many modern artists, modern day “griots”, spoken word artists, mainstream news sources, and academics.[22][23][24][25] Rap lyrics and music are part of the “Black rhetorical continuum”, continuing past traditions of expanding upon them through “creative use of language and rhetorical styles and strategies”.[26]
Blues, rooted in the work songs and spirituals of slavery and influenced greatly by West African musical traditions, was first played by black Americans around the time of the Emancipation Proclamation. Grammy-winning blues musician/historian Elijah Wald and others have argued that the blues were being rapped as early as the 1920s.[27][28] Wald went so far as to call hip hop “the living blues”.[27] A notable recorded example of rapping in blues was the 1950 song “Gotta Let You Go” by Joe Hill Louis.[8]
Jazz, which developed from the blues and other African-American and European musical traditions and originated around the beginning of the 20th century, has also influenced hip hop and has been cited as a precursor of hip hop. Not just jazz music and lyrics but also jazz poetry. According to John Sobol, the jazz musician and poet who wrote Digitopia Blues, rap “bears a striking resemblance to the evolution of jazz both stylistically and formally”.[9] Boxer Muhammad Ali anticipated elements of rap, often using rhyme schemes and spoken word poetry, both for when he was trash talking in boxing and as political poetry for his activism outside of boxing, paving the way for The Last Poets in 1968, Gil Scott-Heron in 1970, and the emergence of rap music in the 1970s.[10]
Precursors also exist in non-African/African-American traditions, especially in vaudeville and musical theater. A comparable tradition is the patter song exemplified by Gilbert and Sullivan but that has origins in earlier Italian opera. “Rock Island” from Meridith Wilson’s The Music Man is wholly spoken by an ensemble of travelling salesmen, as are most of the numbers for British actor Rex Harrison in the 1964 Lerner and Loewe musical My Fair Lady. Glenn Miller‘s “The Lady’s in Love with You” and “The Little Man Who Wasn’t There” (both 1939), each contain distinctly rap-like sequences set to a driving beat as does the 1937 song “Doin’ the Jive“. In musical theater, the term “vamp“ is identical to its meaning in jazz, gospel, and funk, and it fulfills the same function. Semi-spoken music has long been especially popular in British entertainment, and such examples as David Croft’s theme to the 1970s sitcom Are You Being Served? have elements indistinguishable from modern rap.
In classical music, semi-spoken music was made popular by composer Arnold Schoenberg as Sprechstimme, which he used in such pieces as Gurre-Lieder and Pierrot lunaire.[29] In the French chanson field, irrigated by a strong poetry tradition, such singer-songwriters as Léo Ferré or Serge Gainsbourg made their own use of spoken word over rock or symphonic music from the very beginning of the 1970s. Although these probably did not have a direct influence on rap’s development in the African-American cultural sphere, they paved the way for acceptance of spoken word music in the media market, as well as providing a broader backdrop, in a range of cultural contexts distinct from that of the African American experience, upon which rapping could later be grafted.
With the decline of disco in the early 1980s rap became a new form of expression. Rap arose from musical experimentation with rhyming, rhythmic speech. Rap was a departure from disco. Sherley Anne Williams refers to the development of rap as “anti-Disco” in style and means of reproduction. The early productions of Rap after Disco sought a more simplified manner of producing the tracks they were to sing over. Williams explains how Rap composers and DJ’s opposed the heavily orchestrated and ritzy multi-tracks of Disco for “break beats” which were created from compiling different records from numerous genres and did not require the equipment from professional recording studios. Professional studios were not necessary therefore opening the production of rap to the youth who as Williams explains felt “locked out” because of the capital needed to produce Disco records.[30]
More directly related to the African-American community were items like schoolyard chants and taunts, clapping games,[31] jump-rope rhymes, some with unwritten folk histories going back hundreds of years across many nationalities. Sometimes these items contain racially offensive lyrics.[32] A related area that is not strictly folklore is rhythmical cheering and cheerleading for military and sports.
