You Are Reading the First 6 FREE Chapters (470 pages)
DEFINITION OF RAP: DOES THIS APPLY TO CHRIS BOUCHILLON?
Rap n. A style of popular music characterized by rhythmic recitation of rhymed lyrics to music with a pronounced beat or rhythm.
If you accept the above as a fair definition of rap, then white guys independently created a genre of rap decades before the advent of hip-hop, albeit with little resemblance to rap as we know it today.
More irony: white rappers were southerners who played country music—probably the most reviled music among today’s hip-hop artists and fans. Not only that, the white rappers co-opted ablack-created musical idiom for their backing track: the 12-bar blues form. Eventually, white folk musicians co-opted white rap and turned it into a genre associated with leftist protest and social justice causes—anathema to many if not most white southerners, who created white rap in the first place.
How did all this happen?
In 1927, a pipe-smoking country singer-songwriter from South Carolina named Christopher Bouchillon had written a country - blues song and played it for his record producer who liked the lyrics but couldn’t stand Chris’s singing. So he directed Chris to talk the lyrics while playing guitar in his usual rhythmic up-tempo style. So he did. The record was called “Talking Blues,” and it became a national hit. The year was 1927.