Rap Classic

Rap is considered today's modern urban music, but its roots reach far into the past as this provocative project shows. The rapping technique has been present in many American musical genres, for 100 years or more, including early rural music, both black and white, religious songs, blues, ragtime, vaudeville, and hokum. This album features rap precursors by such legendary figures in American music as Blind Willie Johnson, Pine Top Smith, Memphis Jug Band, Butterbeans and Susie, Seven Foot Dilly & his Dill Pickles, Dixieland Jug Blowers, Jimmie Davis, Blind Willie McTell and more! A highly entertaining and provocative exploration into early American musical history.

Soul Jazz Records’ new Boombox features some of the many innovative underground first-wave of rap records made in New York in the period 1979-82, all released on small, independent, often family-concern record companies, at a time when hip-hop music still remained under the radar.

Here are the articled funky beats that hip-hop DJs can’t stop diggin’ in the crates for – including rare grooves aplenty. What’s more, there’s soul, jazz and a message or two to go with those killer breaks. As sampled by everyone in rap - including you?

Sugar Mountain: Live at Canterbury House 1968 the third installment from Neil Young's Archives – although through some weird filing system this is Vol. 00, possibly because this dates before either of the previously released volumes in Archives Performance Series – culls highlights from Neil Young's two shows at Canterbury House in Ann Arbor, MI on November 9 and 10, 1968…