< 50 years ago, teenagers partied in the Bronx — and gave rise to hip-hop

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "FUNKY DRUMMER (PT. 1 AND 2)")

JAMES BROWN: (Singing) One, two, three, four, get it.

JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:

August 1973 - the Bronx, New York City. It was the end of the summer, and teenagers were facing the start of a new school year. A brother and sister threw a party, and that party is agreed upon as the moment that gave birth to hip-hop. That party was 50 years ago this week. And every day, we're going to explore a different key moment that defined the music and the culture, starting at the beginning.

Origin stories can be complicated, but the story that most people tell about hip-hop starts with a pioneering DJ named Kool Herc, who loved funk and soul records, and an otherwise unremarkable high-rise in New York. The address is 1520 Sedgwick Avenue, in the West Bronx.

JERRY LEADER: I wouldn't have picked another place in the world to have a childhood life. I mean, it was beautiful.

SUMMERS: Our guide is Jerry Leader. He's 56 now, and his family lived here for 30 years, starting in 1970. He takes us inside.

(SOUNDBITE OF DOOR CREAKING)

SUMMERS: He and his eight siblings lived on the 17th floor. He was the baby boy. Jerry remembers that his life revolved around music and that it was always playing somewhere in the building.

LEADER: My mother and father, they loved to have parties with their friends and stuff. And they used to collect albums and records and they played a lot of The Temptations.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "AIN'T TOO PROUD TO BEG")

THE TEMPTATIONS: (Singing) Ain't too proud to beg, sweet darling.

LEADER: But downstairs, I heard from Kool Herc and other DJs. They played a lot of the funk records.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "GET UP OFFA THAT THING")

BROWN: (Singing) Get up off of that thing, and dance till you feel better.

DJ KOOL HERC: But James Brown was my man, you know what I'm saying?

SUMMERS: DJ Kool Herc, born Clive Campbell, also lived in 1520 Sedgewick Avenue. He came to New York City from Jamaica when he was 13. As a teenager, he started learning how to disc jockey.

DJ KOOL HERC: And everybody's, ooh, wow.

SUMMERS: Earlier this year, we were able to reach DJ Kool Herc on the phone. He's now 68 years old, which made him 18 years old in 1973. His sister Cindy was 16, and she asked him to DJ her party on August 11.

DJ KOOL HERC: (Laughter) My sister gave a party to go back to school.

SUMMERS: Cindy wanted to buy new clothes for the upcoming school year. She charged 25 cents for girls and 50 cents for boys and rented a community room on the first floor.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: There's Jerry.

SUMMERS: Jerry Leader shows it to us.

LEADER: This is the room here - very small room.

SUMMERS: Maybe 30 feet by 30 feet, extremely low ceilings with two small bathrooms off to the side.

LEADER: He was set up in a closet there with his music, and they jammed out here. Ain't this something?

SUMMERS: This is incredible to think that a moment that now represents the birth of a whole culture happened right here.

LEADER: It's this big.

SUMMERS: Looking around that room now, there is no plaque, no memorabilia. Jerry wasn't at that party - he was 6 at the time - but he grew up hearing about it because parties where Herc DJed, they became events.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "GIVE IT UP OR TURNIT A LOOSE")

BROWN: (Vocalizing).

JEFF CHANG: Everybody that talks about Herc parties back then, talk about two things. They talk about the intensity, the pure sounds of the sound system, but they also talk about the music that Herc played.

SUMMERS: That's Jeff Chang. He wrote a definitive history of hip-hop. He says it wasn't just the music that Herc played, it was how he played it.

CHANG: He loved to play funk music because these were the kinds of sounds that the kids loved to dance to - you know, mostly up-tempo beats that they call the breaks. So Herc would take a James Brown record, like "Give It Up, Turn It Loose" (ph)...

(SOUNDBITE OF JAMES BROWN SONG, "GIVE IT UP OR TURNIT A LOOSE")

CHANG: ...Or he'd take a Jimmy Castor record like "It's Just Begun."

(SOUNDBITE OF THE JIMMY CASTOR BUNCH SONG, "IT'S JUST BEGUN")

CHANG: He would just focus in on those percussive breakdowns where the crowds went wild.

DJ KOOL HERC: The best part of records, I went to it. I'd go right to the yolk.

SUMMERS: Kool Herc developed a technique where he'd play the break from one record, then play just the break from another record on his other turntable. Then he'd cue up another break on his first turntable and on and on. He also figured out how to use his two turntables to loop a single break with two copies of the same record.

(SOUNDBITE OF THE JIMMY CASTOR BUNCH SONG, "IT'S JUST BEGUN")

SUMMERS: And he named it...

DJ KOOL HERC: Watch this, right? I'm going to call this the merry-go-round.

SUMMERS: ...The merry-go-round.

(SOUNDBITE OF THE JIMMY CASTOR BUNCH SONG, "IT'S JUST BEGUN")

SUMMERS: Merry-go-rounds would have been just a small part of Herc's set that evening. But for dancers, what was once just a six-second drum solo could now last a lot longer. As the party wore on, Herc and his friend Coke La Rock got on the mic over the beats.

CHANG: So they'll shout people out. They'll do it in these funny little rhymes. And they notice the energy that they're creating when they do this stuff, so they keep on kind of evolving that. And that actually turns into rap.

SUMMERS: There were people MC'ing. DJ Kool Herc was looping those breaks, and B-Boys and B-Girls were going wild during those breaks or, as it was later called in mainstream media, breakdancing. Put all that together and there is a case to be made that this party was the moment that hip-hop was born.

JAY QUAN: You notice other genres of music generally don't have this kind of backstory. You know, nobody says the day that this blues player, you know, strummed his guitar a certain way, rock 'n' roll was born.

SUMMERS: Jay Quan is a hip-hop historian and writer. He says, yes, that party in 1973 did happen, but some of the same things were going on at other parties in other places.

QUAN: I think there was a need for a backstory because hip-hop got so big that people just needed to have a grand story for such a grand culture.

SUMMERS: At the time, this movement didn't even have a name, and most people didn't see its future.

QUAN: It was poor, urban people kind of making lemonade out of lemons. They didn't mean to start this cultural phenomenon.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

SUMMERS: Young people in the Bronx were laying the foundation of hip-hop against a pretty bleak backdrop. One data point - a 1972 New York Times analysis found that the Bronx had the highest poverty rate of all counties in the region and in all of New York state. Red-lining, urban renewal and new highways built right through existing communities transformed what was once a diverse working-class area into an impoverished one, where mostly Black and Latino people lived. For kids growing up in the Bronx, one thing they could do was go to the local parties.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

SUMMERS: Herc's parties spilled out of that tiny first floor community room and into a public park right down the street. Eventually, he moved to bigger parks and on to club gigs, and people across the city started to hear about him.

NELSON GEORGE: There was a flyer at the store for this show in the Bronx on a Saturday afternoon. So I was like, I should - I'm curious about this.

SUMMERS: That's music journalist and filmmaker Nelson George. He was an intern at Billboard Magazine in 1978, and he was one of the first journalists to write about Kool Herc. He still remembers that show.

GEORGE: There were a bunch of kids kind of hanging out. They pull out card tables, cable and some speakers. And I'd never seen this at the time. They went to the light, and they unscrewed the base of the lamp, and they took the industrial thing and hooked it into the lights from the city.

SUMMERS: The city lights?

GEORGE: Yeah. And set up their equipment using electricity from the light. And the guy was, you know, Kool Herc.

SUMMERS: He says Herc wasn't necessarily the best at mixing, but the stuff he was playing and the way he was playing it and the scene, that was all different. He wrote that Herc was a, quote, "musical innovator of the turntables, his reputation as a party master in the Bronx, unsurpassed."

GEORGE: For me to say that, it must have really struck me as very different from everything else I had been hearing.

SUMMERS: That scene inspired a lot of young people intent on learning how Herc did what he did.

GEORGE: And so that's one reason it spread so widely because it was accessible to teenagers and kids, and it, you know, sparked their imaginations.

(SOUNDBITE OF INCREDIBLE BONGO BAND'S "BONGO ROCK")

SUMMERS: Five years after that back-to-school party, Herc had launched a movement that was becoming bigger than him. Here's Jeff Chang again.

CHANG: It spread throughout the Bronx. It spread into other Black neighborhoods across the boroughs, and everybody is innovating and doing things in their own kind of a way. They want to put their stamp on it. And at some point, you know, this overtakes, you know, what Herc builds.

(SOUNDBITE OF INCREDIBLE BONGO BAND'S "BONGO ROCK")

DEBORA HOOPER: I'm just kind of, like, bored. And I'm sitting in my room, and all of a sudden, I hear this music.

SUMMERS: Debora Hooper was living in the South Bronx in the summer of 1976.

HOOPER: I just asked my mom, can I go outside? And I basically just followed the sound.

SUMMERS: She walked down to a nearby park to find a group of boys DJ'ing and MC'ing and eventually asked if she could get on the mic. She became Debbie D.

HOOPER: 'Cause we had simple names. You just kind of put whatever the first letter of your name was. You just added it there.

SUMMERS: Later, known as MC Debbie D when she went out on her own as a solo female rapper in the '80s.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "US GIRLS")

MC DEBBIE D: (Rapping) Fly girl Debbie D meets the one who could hold my policy...

SUMMERS: She remembers that in the earliest days of this movement, few saw it as a viable career.

HOOPER: Me and all of the pioneers are sitting there trying to figure out, well, what are you going to do after high school? Because you're not doing this. Because there was no money. Nobody saw a future in hip-hop in '79 and '80.

SUMMERS: That's obviously changed. But for Debbie D and others who paved the way, the success of hip-hop is a little bittersweet.

HOOPER: I think it's great. I mean, people have to get a living any way that they can get a living. The only issue that I have with it is that everybody is profiting off of hip-hop but the pioneers, those of us that really laid the foundation to it.

SUMMERS: To some extent, that applies to DJ Kool Herc as well. Unlike the legendary DJs who came after him, like Grandmaster Flash or Afrika Bambaataa, Herc never made the transition to making hip-hop records. But 50 years after the party, he expressed gratitude to those who had recognized his role as a founder of hip-hop, and he encouraged those who now make the culture to take care of it.

DJ KOOL HERC: Hip-hop, they've come a long way, so give back to hip-hop. Give back, you know what I'm sayin'?

SUMMERS: By the late '70s, hip-hop was definitely born, but it had yet to be commercially recorded.

Every day this week, we're going to look at a different moment that defined what hip-hop has become today. Coming up tomorrow, hip-hop gets a record deal.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "RAPPER'S DELIGHT")

THE SUGARHILL GANG: (Rapping) I said-a hip, hop, the hippie, the hippie. To the hip hip hop-a, you don't stop the rock. It to the bang-bang boogie, say up jump the boogie...

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