The Sugarhill Gang is often credited with creating the first major hip hop album as
well the first chart-topping rap single with "Rapper's Delight" in 1979. But there's a
lot more to their story than that. Here's the truth behind these music pioneers.
Sylvia Robinson was a minor music star in the mid-20th century. As one half of the duo
Mickey and Sylvia, she topped the Billboard R&B chart in 1957 with the single "Love is
Strange." Then she had a solo hit in 1973 with "Pillow Talk." In the late 60s, she and
her husband, music industry veteran Joe Robinson, started a soul and R&B label called All Platinum
Records. The company had some successful soul singles in the early 70s, but by the end of
the decade, their influence had faded and they were on the verge of bankruptcy. Robinson
saw a potential financial save at a Harlem club one night in 1979 in the form of rap,
the recently emerging New York-centric party music made by talk-singing over R&B and disco
records.
"She goes, you know what? This is going to happen. I'm gonna happen make a hip hop album,
no matter what."
As Robinson's son Joey recounted to NPR in 2000,
"She saw where a DJ was talking and the crowd was responding to what he was saying, and
this was the first time that she ever saw this before. And she said, 'Joey, wouldn't
this be a great idea to make a rap record?'"
First, Robinson would need a bass groove for rappers to rap over, so she paid 17-year-old
New Jersey session musician Chip Shearin $70 to do it. Meanwhile, the label recruited some
rappers, and they all made "Rapper's Delight" together. The song was attributed to the Sugarhill
Gang, and it became the first release on the All Platinum's imprint Sugar Hill Records.
After Sylvia Robinson got the idea to release a rap record, she realized that she needed
a rapper to perform it. So she lined up a candidate and arranged to meet him at a McDonald's
in Englewood, New Jersey. He decided not to do the song, though, but Robinson had another
candidate on her shortlist. It was a guy from the Bronx who worked at a place called Crispy
Crust Pizza, which happened to be just across the street from the McDonald's. That performer
was Henry Lee Jackson, also known as Big Bank Hank.
"Hey, this is Big Bank Hank, the rappin' pizza guy. She goes, hey, I hear you can rap. Oh
yeah, I can rap."
While all this was going down, budding rapper Guy O'Brien, who performed under the name
Master Gee, happened to be walking past Crispy Crust. He was with his friend Mark Green,
who knew Robinson and her son. That night, Jackson and O'Brien ventured to Robinson's
house and took turns auditioning. Robinson couldn't decide which guy she liked better,
so she opted to hire both.
A third rapper named Michael Wright, aka Wonder Mike, was also present for the tryout. A few
months earlier, he'd joined his cousin's DJ group Sound on Sound as a rapper. One of those
DJs was Ron the Mad Master Mixer, who brought him along to Robinson's home and who had also
suggested that the record they were planning should include a hook based on the Chic song
[SHEEK] "Good Times." During Wright's audition, he presented what would become the introduction
to "Rapper's Delight." He got the job, and the Sugarhill Gang became a trio. Plans were
made to also include a fourth member named Casper, another member of Sound on Sound,
but he backed out after his record executive father told him not to do it.
"Rapper's Delight" marks a definitive moment in time. It was the first major rap recording
and the first one heard by millions of mainstream music fans. Remarkably, it was recorded in
a single take. The music was captured in one session, and then the lyrics were laid down
all at once as well. The song's primary melody is the groove from Chic's "Good Times," but
it isn't sampled or even looped, because the equipment needed for those now-standard practices
wasn't available. Instead, session musician Chip Shearin played it over and over again
in a studio for 15 minutes straight.
With a 15-minute long tape ready for a vocal overlay, Sylvia Robinson brought in the rappers.
She hired them on a Friday, and by the following Monday, they were in the studio rapping to
the beat. Each member took turns to deliver their sections of the song in one take. The
released recording contains no overdubs, so it's essentially a live recording.
It's impressive to capture any song in one take, let alone such a popular and influential
one. But that magic is undercut somewhat by the fact that so much of what makes "Rapper's
Delight" so great was totally stolen. Rappers at New York parties in the late '70s performed
over pre-existing R&B records, so Sylvia Robinson re-created that formula for "Rapper's Delight."
But instead of sampling the bass line from "Good Times," she had a studio musician imitate
it. That constitutes blatant copyright infringement, though, as nobody at Sugarhill Records had
bothered to clear anything with Chic's Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards, the writers of
"Good Times."
Rodgers first heard "Rapper's Delight" on the dance floor at a New York club called
Leviticus. The DJ told Rodgers that he'd bought the record in Harlem. Rodgers and Edwards
eventually sued Sugar Hill Records for copyright infringement. The parties reached a settlement
out of court, resulting in future pressings and releases of "Rapper's Delight" crediting
Rogers and Edwards as co-songwriters, entitling them to a share of the profits in perpetuity.
The Sugarhill Gang raps with confidence and precision for the entire duration of "Rapper's
Delight," which in its original form lasts nearly 15 minutes. That's no small feat, but
the group had a little help.
Before joining the Sugarhill Gang, Big Bank Hank managed Curtis Brown, also known as Grandmaster
Caz and Casanova Fly, an early rapper in the Bronx in the '70s with his group the Cold
Crush Brothers. According to Brown, Jackson borrowed money from his parents to buy the
Cold Crush Brothers a better sound system. To pay it back, he got a job at Crispy Crust
Pizza, which is where Sylvia Robinson discovered him and hired him, as he was rapping some
of Brown's lyrics, which formed the basis of "Rapper's Delight." In 2014, Brown told
the New York Post,
"It was his job as my manager to introduce me to Sylvia. [But] he was an opportunist
and he just jumped on it for himself. Hank couldn't rap a package. He didn't change one
word of the song — I was Casanova Fly, not him."
"What is Hank supposed to tell Sylvia Robinson?" "Supposed to say, 'Well, I'm not a rapper.
Let me go introduce you to the dudes on the tape.'" "There you go."
The Sugarhill Gang didn't invent rap. Sylvia Robinson simply determined that the time was
right to capitalize on a sound that had already been growing in popularity. According to The
Boombox, the first single that's a recognizable example of modern rap music is "King Tim III
(Personality Jock)" by The Fatback Band, a B-side of the early 1979 single "You're My
Candy Sweet." A few months after that track came out, "Rapper's Delight" made its debut
on the Billboard Hot 100. In January 1980, the song would peak at number 36 on the pop
chart, making it the first rap song to land on the Top 40.
"Rapper's Delight" also became the first rap song to be a smash hit on R&B radio, as it
reached number 4 on the Billboard R&B chart. For a song from an emerging musical style
to get crucial radio airplay is remarkable on its own, but for "Rapper's Delight" to
do it is even more surprising when you consider how long the song's original versions are.
Mainstream commercial radio stations typically prefer songs that are no more than three or
four minutes long, but "Rapper's Delight" nevertheless got airplay in both its six-and-a-half
minute short version and its full-length 15-minute iteration.
The Sugarhill Gang expanded from releasing very long singles in 1979 to making an entire
album in 1980. In February of that year, their self-titled full-length LP hit record stores
around the United States. That was a big moment for the group and for rap in general. According
to The Source, it's the first rap album in history. It consisted of just six tracks,
including yet another version of "Rapper's Delight" that clocks in at just under five
minutes, along with the group's second single, the little-noticed "Rapper's Reprise (Jam
Jam)."
And that's just about all the actual rap that appears on this so-called first rap album.
According to The Boombox, Sylvia Robinson didn't think that a 39-minute LP of rap music
would be commercially viable. So she instead had the album filled out with selections of
tried-and-true musical forms, like soul and disco.
The Sugarhill Gang made monumental history with "Rapper's Delight," but they never had
much tangible success on the charts after that. They're technically a one-hit wonder,
and barely at that. "Rapper's Delight" just scraped into the Billboard Top 40 in 1979,
peaking at number 36. Two follow-up singles couldn't land much radio airplay. "8th Wonder"
and "Apache" managed to be top 20 R&B hits in the early 80s, but they barely made a dent
on the pop chart.
A succession of singles followed, but none registered much with the public, not even
a potential comeback attempt in 1989 in the form of a "Rapper's Delight" remix. None of
the group's four albums that were released between 1980 and 1984 went platinum or even
gold, which led to the band going on a long recording hiatus. Their last release to date
was 1999's Jump on It!, a rap album for children. It features "Kids' Rapper's Delight (Kid's
Rap-Along)," a toned-down version of "Rapper's Delight" with kids' voices added to the mix,
as well as a family-friendlier cover version of Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five's
"The Message" called "It's Like a Dream Sometimes."
"Rapper's Delight" made millions for the Sugarhill Gang and Sugar Hill Records, as it sold around
two million copies. The band also scored another huge payday more than 20 years after the song's
original recording because of a lawsuit. In 1998, the group filed suit against Turner
Broadcasting after the company commissioned a performance of "Rapper's Delight." The rappers
were told that the clip would appear only on closed-circuit TVs at the Studio 54 nightclub
in New York City as part of a pre-Goodwill Games promotional event.
But instead the footage ended up in a TV commercial for Snapple, a Goodwill Games sponsor. In
their defense, the beverage company and broadcaster both contended that the Sugarhill Gang were
told beforehand about the ad in question. In 2002, the United States District Court
for the Southern District of New York ruled in favor of the Sugarhill Gang. The musicians
were awarded $165,000 in compensatory damages and a whopping $2.8 million in punitive damages.
Sylvia Robinson died in 2011, which meant that control of Sugar Hill Records was passed
down to her son, Joey Robinson Jr. He toured under the name of the Sugarhill Gang, which
he had the legal right to. This led to some confusion for fans of old school rap. Robinson's
version of the Sugarhill Gang toured for years, but the performers who actually recorded "Rapper's
Delight" weren't a part of it, and they had to do their own thing under a different name.
The surviving members of the original trio performed for a while in the United States
as "Rapper's Delight Featuring Wonder Mike and Master Gee." But trademark laws are different
in Europe. So in that continent the rappers were able to exploit some loopholes and perform
under their individual stage names while boasting that they were "formerly of" and the "original
members of" the Sugarhill Gang. By 2016, shortly after Joey Robinson Jr. died and his version
of the rap collective fell apart, the original members had successfully worked out legal
arrangements to perform as the Sugarhill Gang once again.
"Y'all remember the Sugarhill Gang?! Y'all remember the Sugarhill Gang?!"
The group remains active, albeit with some necessary lineup changes, as Big Bank Hank
passed away in 2014 after a battle with cancer, and Henry Williams, aka Hen Dogg, ostensibly
now occupies his place in the band. In 2019, the trio toured to commemorate the 40th anniversary
of "Rapper's Delight," alongside fellow early rap pioneers The Furious Five.
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