Fatback Band releases 'King Tim III (Personality Jock)' — the first commercial rap recording
The Fatback Band issues 'King Tim III (Personality Jock)' as a B-side to 'You're My Candy Sweet' on Spring Records. The track — featuring radio DJ Tim Washington rhyming over the Fatback funk band — pre-dates Sugarhill Gang's 'Rapper's Delight' by several months and is widely identified as the first commercial recording featuring rap vocals.
Why it matters
March 1979. The Fatback Band put out a song called "King Tim III (Personality Jock)" as the B-side to a single called "You're My Candy Sweet." Lock the date in your head: March 1979. Six months before "Rapper's Delight." "King Tim III" is the first commercial recording with rap vocals on it, and it is not a particularly close call. So why don't you know it? Why do you know "Rapper's Delight" and not Tim Washington? Because "Rapper's Delight" crossed over. It made the Top 40. "King Tim III" did not. Fatback was a funk band that had stumbled into rap. Sugarhill Records was a label set up explicitly to sell rap. When the canon settled, it settled around the second commercial rap record, not the first. Spring Records put out the first. The history books wrote down the second. That is how it usually works, actually.
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