Sylvia Robinson

Bio

Sylvia Robinson released the first commercially distributed rap record. The record is "Rapper's Delight." The release date is September 16, 1979. The label is Sugar Hill Records. Sylvia ran the label. She also assembled the group that recorded the song (the Sugarhill Gang, a trio of New Jersey kids who had not been part of the Bronx scene where hip-hop was actually being invented). She also produced the record. She also licensed the bassline from Chic's "Good Times." She did the whole thing.

She was born Sylvia Vanderpool on March 6, 1935, in New York. She had been in the music business since the 1950s, recording R&B singles with Mickey Baker as Mickey & Sylvia (their "Love Is Strange," 1956, was a top-twenty hit). She married Joe Robinson, an industry veteran, and the two of them ran the All Platinum Records label out of Englewood, New Jersey, through the 1970s.

Hip-hop, at that point, was a party form. It had been around for six years. The breakbeat DJs (Herc, Bambaataa, Flash, Theodore) and the MCs (Coke La Rock, Grandmaster Caz, Melle Mel) were doing it live at parties in the Bronx. Nobody in the music industry was paying attention. Robinson, by various accounts, heard somebody (depending on the source: her son, a cousin, a friend) rapping along to a record at a club. She decided to bottle it.

She put together the Sugarhill Gang — Big Bank Hank, Wonder Mike, Master Gee — in 1979. She had Hank essentially copy verses from Grandmaster Caz's notebook (an arrangement that would later become a famous unsettled debt). She licensed the Chic bassline. She had the studio musicians play it live. She had the Gang rap over it. The record came out in September. It sold two million copies. It charted on the Billboard Hot 100. It was the first time anybody outside the South Bronx heard hip-hop as a recorded form.

Sylvia followed it up with Sugar Hill signings: the Sugarhill Gang's subsequent records, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five (whose "The Message" she co-produced in 1982), the Funky Four Plus One, and others. Sugar Hill was, for the first half of the 1980s, the most important hip-hop label in the world.

Then the disputes started. Robinson reportedly underpaid Flash and the Furious Five. The label went through serious legal trouble around mid-1980s royalty disputes. Sugar Hill was eventually folded. Robinson went into semi-retirement.

She died on September 29, 2011, at 76, from congestive heart failure. The obituaries called her the Mother of Hip-Hop. The Library of Congress has the original "Rapper's Delight" single in the National Recording Registry. There is, in any honest accounting of how hip-hop became a recorded form rather than a party form, exactly one origin story. Sylvia Robinson is in it. She is, in many ways, the main character.