Rap 1

Vestiges of the "rappin'" tradition are evident as far back as the 1920s when African Americans began their massive migration from the South to the Northern cities, and they took Southern traditions with them. As a result, Southern vernacular language evolved as an urban way of speaking. One of its main characteristics was reassigning alternative meanings to English words (as, for example, with the word "crib," which translates as abode) and creating a non-standardized or new vocabulary that was in constant flux, known commonly among the urban Black masses as " jive talk." The ingenuity of speaking in jive relies on a personalized style able to reinvent the English language and make it meaningful for African Americans in urban environments. Harlem Renaissance (1921-1933) writers such as Langston Hughes and Sterling Brown capitalized on urban jive and blues forms in their works, and in the 1940s urban jive talk became the vocabulary of bebop jazz culture. In addition, beboppers such as Dizzy Gillespie occasionally employed jive talk in their performances. Louis Jordan laced his songs with jive spoken in rhyme to the beat of his music, as in his 1940s classics, " Saturday Night Fish Fry♫" and " Caldonia♫ ." Amos Milburn's song " Chicken Shack Boogie♫ " (1963) is another example of jive talking.