These are Gildan (US standard sizes) & SOL (raglan EU sizes) shirts, screen printed using brown water-based inks.
Before Hip-Hop emerged, sound poets and spoken word artists mastered the metrics of rhythmic speech to expand the human voice’s sonic lexicon.
Drawing from African oral traditions, the blues, street poetry and the Civil Rights and Black Arts movements, figures like Sarah Webster Fabio, Jeanne Lee, Abbey Lincoln, Jayne Cortez and Camille Yarbrough (and many more) performed cadenced speech – both on and off-tempo – over jazz and soulful rhythms. This laid the conceptual groundwork for what we know as Rap, where poetry, political commentary and music fused into a single expression.
Their performances and recordings from the 1960s and 1970s predated the structural and stylistic elements of Rap, with polyrhythmic rhyming schemes, social criticism and words that blurred the line between singing and speaking.
By owning their space as prominent female voices in a male-dominated Jazz scene, these five women provided a template that would later define the vocal art of Hip-Hop, alongside Jamaican toasting.
For your ears:
Max Roach feat. Abbey Lincoln – We Insist! (1961)
Sarah Webster Fabio – Boss Soul (1972)
Jeanne Lee – Conspiracy (1974)
Camille Yarbrough – The Iron Pot Cooker (1975)
Jayne Cortez – Unsubmissive Blues (1980)
