“So,” says Ford, “ that was my inspiration.”įord shared this dream with his music-loving colleague at Billboard, J.B. Dilla, UGK, Raekwon, Onyx, Lil Kim, Redman, Busta Rhymes, House of Pain, Slick Rick, Schooly D, Mobb Deep, EPMD, LL Cool J, De La Soul, Naughty by Nature and MC 900 Ft. “Christmas Rappin’” has been sampled 181 times, including by the Beastie Boys, Public Enemy, Nas, Cypress Hill, J.
It just so happened that Ford worked alongside an older guy named Mickey Addy, who’d written a Christmas record for Perry Como in 1951, and who swore that you could always make money on a Christmas song because it plays every year, year after year, no matter what. So what if no one had ever made a rap record before? So what if the mainstream music industry cared nothing about rap? So what if the earthshaking success of the Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight” was still a few months down the road? That’s when lightning struck, Ford decided he’d make a Christmas rap record. So, he thought, how could he conjure up the necessary dough? “I’d promised my father that I was gonna take care of any kid that I brought into this world,” he recalls. An honorable young man, Ford knew he had to do the right thing. It was just enough to keep his nose above water, but hardly enough to support a child. Soon to turn 30, Ford was working as a reporter and reviewer for Billboard magazine, a job he loved that paid him maybe $300 a week. It was the spring of 1979 when a wanna-be record producer named Robert Ford, known as Rocky to his friends, got his girlfriend pregnant. Four decades after the song’s release, the story behind its enduring success is a tale worth telling. And, as is true of hip-hop more generally, that presumptuousness turned out to be entirely justified. “Robeson was multi-talented so I plotted my life to be like that,” he says.Īlthough Blow’s “Christmas Rappin’” was one of the very first rap records ever to see the light of day, in retrospect, the brash confidence was quintessentially hip-hop. 1979)-said his role model was the actor, singer and civil rights activist Paul Robeson. The talented and ambitious Harlemite Kurtis Blow-born Curtis Walker (above ca. ‘bout things you wrote before I was aliveĪnd for the next three-and-a-half minutes, Blow unspools a story about Santa stopping in Harlem to drop off some gifts on Christmas Eve, then deciding to hang out and party with the gang of young people he meets on the premises. Blow spells out the seeds of his impatience: The rapper then turns to his band, instructs them to “Hit it!” and, as the beat drops like a punch to the gut, young Mr. “Hold it now! Hold it -that’s played out!” Blow shouts at the twit. That was the moment, 40 years ago this month, when the 20-year-old African-American rapper Kurtis Blow made his debut on wax. It begins with a tony-sounding English gent reciting the opening lines of Clement Clark Moore’s “Twas the Night Before Christmas.” The Brit gets exactly ten words into the holiday standard before being rudely interrupted. The 1979 "Christmas Rappin'" was "so witty" says rapper Kurtis Blow (above in 2016 at the Art of Rap festival in Los Angeles).
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