Straight Outta…Norfolk?

Honoring eighty-plus years of rap music. Yes, yes, y’all—eighty

Okay, Blast-Master KRS-One. New York’s Boogie Down Bronx may be the “birthplace” of hip-hop music and all that. But some of its precious blueprint now appears to have come from the rough-n-rugged suburbs of Norfolk, VA.

That’s right, y’all — Norfork, Virginia.

It was in the Norfolk suburb of Berkley specifically where the legendary gospel music act known as the Golden Gate Quartet was formed back in the dirty 1930s. Negro spirituals were this crew’s specialty, but they were best known for rockin’ the mic with a trademark blend of toe-tapping gospel, marinated in the secular music styles of jazz, blues, pop, and — quite shockingly — even rap.

This was decades before rap music even had a name.

Even more remarkably, their 1937 de facto remix of Arthur Collin’s “Preacher and the Bear” may be the oldest and best-defined recorded example of the music style that would come to revolutionize music four decades later with the 1979 release of Sugar Hill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight.”

In other words, party people in the houuuse, the Golden Gate Quartet is ground zero of hip-hop’s old school.

Word to your mother’s uncle.

Paco Taylor is a culture writer from Chicago. He loves old history books, Japanese giant monster movies, hip-hop, anime, comics, Kit Kats, and kung fu flicks.