Black History Through Rap
Today, the late C. Delores Tucker is mostly remembered as a onetime civil-rights activist who agitated for Congressional hearings and boycotts against “gangsta rap.” Ironic then that, years before she waged war in the press against the likes of 2Pac, Tucker helped assemble a rap compilation featuring several teenagers from the Philadelphia area.
Released in 1985, Black History Through Rap was a collaboration between McDonald’s and Philly station WDAS-FM; and the Philadelphia Martin Luther King, Jr. Association for Nonviolence, an organization Tucker founded in 1983. It reflected civic and political attempts to corral a genre increasingly popular among youth into bland yet well intentioned anti-crime, stay-in-school, and “say no to drugs” message raps. “We want to take charge of the messages our children receive through RAP,” wrote MLK Association for Non-Violence executive director Anita Rogers on the album’s back cover.
The compilation’s producer is Eddie “D” Drummond, a songwriter who scored a local hit, “Cold Cash $ Money,” in 1984 on Pop Art Records. In a 2009 interview with Jesse Serwer for Wax Poetics, Pop Art founder Lawrence Goodman credited the single with inspiring him to focus on rap instead of funk and R&B – a decision that paid off with Roxanne Shanté’s “Roxanne’s Revenge” at the end of the year. “Cold Cash $ Money” is a florid electro cut that awkwardly switches from message-style complaints about unemployment to a patriotic Cold War warning against the Soviet Union for shooting down a passenger jet in 1983.
Other noted contributors to Black History Through Rap include WDAS DJs Joseph “Butterball” Tamburro and Jocko Henderson. The latter, who often called himself “the original rapper” for the Mills Brothers-styled rhymes he’d drop during broadcasts, released “Rhythm Talk,” a disco-rap 12-inch issued sometime between 1979 and 1980 that incorporates McFadden & Whitehead’s deathless “Ain’t No Stopping Us Now.” The compilation’s backing musicians included Brenda Hill, a vocalist whose credits include Evelyn “Champagne” King, and Donald Murphy, who later sang backup vocals for Levert.
Not much is known about the youth who performed tracks titled after great Black heroes, like “Benjamin Banneker” by The Rap Fraternity, and “Harriet Tubman” by Tammy Eakins and Friend. What do they think of the way rap music grew up into a mirror image of America’s high-minded aspirations and low-minded obsessions? Did they continue to engage in the culture as it blossomed? Or did its perceived toxicity spark them to angrily protest its evolution, just as it did with C. Delores Tucker?
