Dubbed “Hip-Hop’s First Godmother” by Billboard, singer and music producer Sylvia Robinson produced the first-ever commercially successful rap record: “Rapper’s Delight,” by the Sugar Hill Gang. And along with her husband, she co-owned the first hip-hop label, Sugar Hill Records.
In 1960, a 25-year-old performer-songwriter named Sylvia Vanderpool Robinson — then of the guitar-and-vocal duo Mickey & Sylvia, known for their million-selling “Love Is Strange” — walked into a recording studio in Manhattan to work with a New Orleans artist named Joe Jones on a tune he called “You Talk Too Much.”
Sylvia Robinson walked out a record producer.