Heather Augustyn will never tell you that Hip Hop isn’t an American-born movement, but if you can’t pick up the Jamaican and Ska influences in it, you’re not listening close enough.
For Augustyn, one of the world’s foremost historians on Ska music and professor for Purdue University Northwest’s Westville campus, American music extended its hand to Jamaica via the airwaves in the 1950s, she explained during her Black History Month lecture, “Wheels of Steel: A Circular History of Hip Hop” at the school’s Hammond campus. The Jamaicans, in return, brought their own style of what they learned and loved back to the United States when they came here.
A DJ from Philly likely started it all: Douglas “Jocko” Henderson’s “Rocket Ship” show on WDAS was known for his catchy, rhythmic turns-of-phrase, shouting out to the “Daddios” and talking about the “Great googa mooga shooga booga,” in the mid-1950s, she said. That lexicon then started showing up at Jamaican House of Joy parties, where a so-called toaster would stand in front of a humongous wall of speakers with a turntable and a microphone and perform short “raps.”
“Part of what they were doing is a percussive technique, which comes back in Hip Hop,” Augustyn said. “They were replicating what they heard from the U.S.”
Finding recordings of the toasters is extremely difficult, however, because they performed live, she said. Augustyn, however, noticed in some of her research that some Ska music sounded like the stuff she would roller skate to when she was in middle school and high school, so she felt in her bones there was a connection.
An interview with renowned Jamaican music producer Clive Chin for a paper she was working on around 10 years ago confirmed her suspicions. The first known Jamaican toaster, Count Matchuki, used to carry a jive dictionary in his pocket to replicate the language, she said, so that made sense to her.
A second conversation with another Jamaican heavy-hitter, Godfather of Hip Hop Clive “DJ Kool Herc” Campbell, however, confirmed her theory. Campbell, who migrated to Bronx, New York, with his family when he was 12 in 1967, grew up sneaking into house parties with the King George walls of sound, she said, and when he got to America, he would play Jamaican music for his new friends.
With the cultural differences — Jamaicans were fighting against British colonialism at the time — Campbell’s music didn’t translate to kids who were more into disco and funk. But then at a back-to-school party he threw for his sister in 1973, he played Latin funk and disco but invoked the Jamaican Toasters into his flow, she said.
“I found Herc through his sister, and I asked him if there was a connection between Hip Hop and Jamaican music, and he flat-out admitted it. I about fell out of my chair,” Augustyn said. “He had to have heard (the jive-talking American DJs).”
A new twist Campbell employed, and one that’s still used in Hip Hop, was the two turntable Merry-Go-Round technique, Augustyn added.
Augustyn reworked her study findings for a popular music magazine and garnered quite a bit of social media blowback from people who insist that Hip Hop is strictly American. That was never her intention, she said.
“I’m not saying Hip Hop is Jamaican; all I was saying is it was a path to Hip Hop as opposed to the path to it. It’s not my culture, and I don’t want to create negativity around the stuff I revere,” she said. “I do see Ska in everything, so every chance I get to ‘skavangelize,’ I’m all for it.
PNW Web and Events Coordinator Raymond Kosinski said his history background spoke to him when talking to Augustyn about making her presentation.
“As someone who’s a fan of Hip Hop all my life, this was really informative,” he said.
Mary Beth Connolly, a history lecturer for the school, called the presentation a “way down Memory Lane.”
“You kind of know the connections, but I didn’t know this connection,” Connolly said. “When you talk about the Harlem Renaissance, you don’t think about how powerful radio was in the 1930s and 1940s, but it was broadcast all over the country.”
Michelle L. Quinn is a freelance reporter for the Post-Tribune.
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