Toasts to Stagger Lee and the hip hop
The earliest documented “toasts” ( long, rhythmic, narrative spoken poems) appear exclusively in Black American communities in the late 1800s and early 1900s. These toasts were not songs but oral performances delivered with cadence, timing, braggadocio, and dramatic narrative structure which is the same performance DNA later found in rap. Folklorists like John Lomax, Henry Lomax, Lawrence Gellert, and G.H. Boswell collected these toasts directly from Black men in Southern prisons, chain gangs, lumber camps, levee camps, and juke joints decades before any Caribbean “toasting” tradition is documented. This material was not imported from Africa or the Caribbean. It emerged organically from Black American vernacular culture through signifying, The Dozens, badman tales, work-songs, and jive-talk. By the time the Great Migration carried millions of Black Southerners into Northern cities after 1910, the toast tradition was already a fully developed American oral form.
The geographic spread of these toasts is exclusively American: Mississippi Delta juke joints, Texas prison farms, Louisiana sugar parishes, Arkansas levee towns, Memphis street corners, New Orleans barrelhouses, and early Black neighborhoods in St. Louis, Chicago, Detroit, and Harlem. These toasts circulated long before audio recording was widespread, which is why folklorists captured them only once they reached Northern cities or when they directly interviewed Southern laborers who had known these toasts since at least the 1890s. There’s evidence that these toasts go back even further into the slave days. These are well documented.
That brings me to one of the oldest recorded toasts.
“Stackolee / Stagolee / Stagger Lee” (Oldest on record: 1897)
The story of Stackolee is the oldest documented toast in the United States. The earliest paper trail comes from the Kansas City Leavenworth Herald (21 Aug 1897) describing a performance connected to the Stack-a-Lee narrative. By 1910, folklorist John Lomax received a full transcription from Ella Fisher, confirming its spread throughout Black communities in the lower Mississippi Valley. These early versions were spoken narrative poems and were not sung ballads.
Jamaica has no equivalent tradition predating 1897.
The Titanic sank in 1912, and by 1912–1915, Black Americans had already created a fully formed toast about Shine. Folklorists like Roger Abrahams and Bruce Jackson confirmed circulation by 1918, especially in New Orleans, Mississippi Delta, and East Texas. This toast emerged instantly within Black American culture as it is evidence of a living oral tradition rapidly producing heroic, humorous, and subversive narratives.
How about we bring up Signifying Monkey. There is NO Caribbean record from this period exists and Jamaica’s earliest comparable performance poetry dates decades later. Although written publication occurred later, Henry Louis Gates Jr. and other scholars confirm that this toast circulated orally in Black communities before 1920. Early collections of Black American folklore (Newman Ivey White, 1920s) contain trickster monkey narratives with the same structure. The roots lie in Black American verbal play. Jamaica had no “Signifying Monkey” tradition until it was imported by American media in the mid-20th century. John Lomax’s field notes from 1910–1917 include multiple spoken toasts from Black inmates in Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi. These included “The Wild Cat Rider”, “Dobe Shine”, “The Gobbler”, “The Candy Man” These performances were rhythmic, boastful, and structurally identical to early rap storytelling. No Caribbean collector from this era records anything similar because these traditions did not exist yet in the Caribbean.
When Black Southerners migrated to the North during the Great Migration (1910–1970), they carried these toasts into new urban environments. Harlem, Chicago, and Detroit became hubs for the verbal arts. In Harlem during the Renaissance (1920s), the toast tradition blended with jazz poetry, rent-party performances, and the slick jive-talk of Black radio personalities who later shaped American DJ culture. This Northern evolution created the bridge between the Southern toast tradition and later forms like spoken word, performance poetry, dozens battles, and eventually MCing in hip-hop.
By the 1930s, toasting was fully American, practiced in barbershops, pool halls, corner stoops, juke joints, rent parties, and prison yards. No Caribbean toast tradition existed in this era but Jamaican musicians were listening to all of this.
Toasting was exported to the Caribbean (Especially Jamaica) via Black American radio broadcasts during the 40s and 60s. Caribbean audiences, especially in Jamaica, were heavily influenced by the booming, rhythmic, charismatic style of Black American DJs. This included rhythmic patter, jive talk, improvised rhyming, and crowd control all descended from the toast tradition. Jamaican sound-system pioneers openly credit Black American radio DJ styles as a direct influence. A Jamaican issue of Lloyd Price’s recording “Stagger Lee / You Need Love” was released in 1958 on an ABC-Paramount “Jamaican Blue Label” 45 RPM single. The absence of any Caribbean Stagger Lee before 1950, combined with the presence of American versions 60 years earlier.
Many Black American servicemen were stationed in Caribbean bases during World War II. They brought: signifying, dozens, rhythmic braggadocio, street-corner rhyming and rap cadence. These oral forms filtered into Caribbean youth culture. Jamaica imported massive amounts of: Black American blues, early forms of R&B, jump blues, comedy records (including spoken monologues), and jive-talking radio broadcast recordings and all of these will shape the Jamaican “deejay” style. Count Machuki, U-Roy, Big Youth, Prince Buster, and Derrick Harriott all credit American radio DJs for the rhythm, cadence, and style of Jamaican toasting. In other words: The Caribbean received American-style rhythmic speech first, then innovated its own local form. It was not the other way around.
American Radio Influence: Jamaican sound system operators and early deejays (like Count Machuki) in the 1950s were heavily influenced by American R&B records and the jive talk/boasting style of US radio disc jockeys, whose signals reached the island from cities like Miami and New Orleans. The Jamaican Deejays took the musical format (instrumental records/riddims) and combined the jive talk style with themes from the American “Bad Man” narratives (like Stagger Lee, which resonated with the local Rudeboy culture) and other local Jamaican themes. The style was popularized by U-Roy in the early 1970s, who became the first Deejay star to record full-length tracks, cementing Toasting as a musical art form.
Remember the Great Migration in all of this. Before the wave of Jamaican immigration (which peaked in the late 1960s and 1970s), Black American “Toasting” existed primarily as an oral, rhythmic narrative art form, as previously discussed with “Stagger Lee” and the “Signifying Monkey.”
In New York, this tradition was kept alive in settings like barbershops and other social clubs. Men would gather and recite long, rhyming narratives, often in a style that was already rhythmic and full of clever wordplay. In correctional facilities, where the toasts were preserved and disseminated in their rawest, most explicit forms (like the field recordings of folklorists). Figures like Rudy Ray Moore (Dolemite), who was active in the 1970s and performed a version of the toast tradition (e.g., the Dolemite and Signifying Monkey toasts) in clubs and on non-commercial records. While Moore was based in Los Angeles, his records and style circulated widely and directly influenced New York artists, including early rappers
The collection Slave Songs of the United States (1867) includes numerous lyrics transcribed from songs sung by enslaved people, with repetitive structures and rhyming patterns.
In “Some Songs From the Slave Narratives from Texas,” a former slave recounted:
“Can, can, candio, /
Old man Dandio, /
How many men you got? /
More’n you’re able to cotch.” Mama Lisa’s World
Another one,
All eight balance and all eight swing,
All left allemond and right hand grand,
Meet your partner and prom’nade, eight,
Den march till you come straight.’
‘First lady out to couple on de right,
Swing Mr. Adam and swing Miss Eve,
Swing Old Adam befo’ you leave,
Don’t forgit your own – now you’re home.
Dose black-eyed peas is lucky,
When et on New Year’s Day;
You’ll allus have sweet ‘taters
And possum come you way.
Campbell Davis:
Hop light, li’l lady,
The cakes all dough,
Don’t mind de weather,
Jus’ so de wind don’t blow.
The evidence presented is indisputable: these developments did not emerge in a vacuum. The earliest rhythmic narratives, toasts, signifying folklore, badman ballads, jive-talk cadences, and proto-rap performances all appear first, fully formed, inside Black American communities long before any parallel traditions arose elsewhere. From Stack-O’-Lee in the 1890s to Shine and the Titanic in the 1910s, from the Signifying Monkey circulating before 1920 to the prison toasts documented in the 1910s and 1920s, every verifiable origin point is Black American. No Caribbean, African, or European source predates these American examples. When these artforms later appear abroad (especially in the Caribbean) they do so through the clear historical channels of migration, Black American presence, imported records, American radio, and direct cultural influence. The attempt to attribute these cultural creations to non–Black Americans is not an accident as it reflects a long pattern of erasure, appropriation, and subversion that targets Black American cultural production. The record shows that Black Americans didn’t just participate in these traditions they invented them.
It is important for one to study and learn their history. They are actively burying, redefining, rewriting our history to fit historic narratives that are submerged in distortions historical reconstructions and false attributions.
Jamicans DID NOT invent Hiphop, improvised? yes. Invented? No. influenced elements? Kinda.
What Music was played at Dj Kool Herc’s parties?
What music were they playing back in Jamaica?
There is a long pattern of people using phenotypical conflation to capture BA culture, center their culture, then hijack the original context and redefine it.
I have a metaphor for this: If YOU threw a party, and I bring some Nachos, is it my party now? Does my contribution to your party makes it my party? Does it mean I helped plan that party? Does that mean that its now our party?
Black America was cool for so long, treating things as “Our” party while guests began to claim areas of the house as their own. Even now, we havent started kicking people out, we have told them to chill that this is really our party and they hate to hear that.
They bank on what you don’t know, twist truth till it’s hollow and thin,
Rewrite our story in shadows, hopin’ we never look within.
But every buried line we dig up hits harder than a hammer
So stand tall, Black America… ’cause
We Remember and We the Blueprint
https://www.reddit.com/r/blackamerica/s/m3auRq4FGM Stagger Lee
https://www.reddit.com/r/blackamerica/s/DYXulm4H8t Signifyin Monkey
