Veteran Ghanaian musician Gyedu-Blay Ambolley has pushed back against the long-held belief that rap music originated in America.
According to him, the genre traces its roots to Africa, and he insists that he was the first to commercialise rap in the early 1970s, years before America’s Sugarhill Gang.
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In an interview on Joy Prime TV, Ambolley explained that his 1973 song “Simigwa” carried the same rhythmic, spoken style which was later branded as “rap” in the United States.
“When I was doing it at that time, there wasn’t any word like rap or anything like that. We are talking about the early 70s to 73. If you look at it, you go back to, what we call, the Guinness Book of Records, they were saying that rap came from America, talking about the Sugarhill Gang, the Rapper’s Delight. Their age, at that time that the music came out, was 78, 79. I had released already,” Ambolley said.
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For decades, music history has credited the Sugarhill Gang as originators of rap, largely because Rapper’s Delight was the first rap song to achieve commercial success in the US.
But the veteran musician has argued that this version of history leaves out the fact that spoken word art was already a big part of African oral traditions, especially in Ghana, long before Sugarhill Gang.
He said what the world now calls “rap” is African, pointing to the chants of traditional Ghanaian linguists who announce the arrival of chiefs and kings with spoken words. In his view, those chants were rap in its rawest form and he came to add rhythm to them.
“Rap is not an American thing; rap is an African thing. Because when the king is coming, we have the linguist. Nana ba o, Nana ba o, these are all rap but without rhythms and I was the one who added rhythm to that kind of rap,” he explained.
Ambolley disclosed that he has been challenging this narrative for years, even going as far as contacting Guinness World Records to set the record straight. So far, however, his efforts have been met with silence.
“I have been challenging them telling them that somebody did not do his or her homework well so they need to rectify it. I have been challenging them. We wrote to them but no response yet,” he said.
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