Posted on 12/29/2008 3:18:10 PM PST by nickcarraway
Professor Ferenc Szasz argued that so-called rap battles, where two or more performers trade elaborate insults, derive from the ancient Caledonian art of "flyting".
According to the theory, Scottish slave owners took the tradition with them to the United States, where it was adopted and developed by slaves, emerging many years later as rap.
Professor Szasz is convinced there is a clear link between this tradition for settling scores in Scotland and rap battles, which were famously portrayed in Eminem's 2002 movie 8 Mile.
He said: "The Scots have a lengthy tradition of flyting - intense verbal jousting, often laced with vulgarity, that is similar to the dozens that one finds among contemporary inner-city African-American youth.
"Both cultures accord high marks to satire. The skilled use of satire takes this verbal jousting to its ultimate level - one step short of a fist fight."
The academic, who specialises in American and Scottish culture at the University of New Mexico, made the link in a new study examining the historical context of Robert Burn's work.
The most famous surviving example of flyting comes from a 16th-century piece in which two rival poets hurl increasingly obscene rhyming insults at one another before the Court of King James IV.
Titled the Flyting Of Dunbar And Kennedy, it has been described by academics as "just over 500 lines of filth".
Professor Szasz cites an American civil war poem, printed in the New York Vanity Fair magazine on November 9, 1861, as the first recorded example of the battles being used in the United States.
Professor Willie Ruff, of Yale University, agreed that Scottish slave owners had a profound impact on the development of African American music traditions.
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
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I was scanning the comments to see if anybody brought up BR&WL.
Sowell knows his stuff.
Straight = STRAUCHT.
There may be something to this. I’ve said that there is a tradition of talking in rhythm over music in country music (whether it is Smoke The Cigarette, One Piece At A Time, The Hot Rod Race are only a few examples that come to mind).
And country/hillbilly music has its origins in the Southern Appalachian Mountains of North America.
I’ve also read that the roots of country music lie in the folk music that English, Irish, and Scottish settlers brought to America.
So there is a continuim that does not even need “slave owners/importers” to be considered a factor in this equation.
The whole bit about “insults” and vulgarity (in rhyme?) being the basis of rap is wrong.
That would be “the toast” which was the boast and pomp of pimps, who served as inspiration to modern rappers. But there were a number of other pimps who went into music as singers without incorporating that into their act.
Pimps would have spent time in jail and there could also be a whole jail culture for boasts, vulgarity, oneupsmanship, and style. Also the use of “hip” lingo to keep the man, or the boss (on the plantation) from knowing what you are talking about; even Lord Buckley, who was rapping in the 1940s and 1950s, explained this aspect.
Also, there is Cockney Rhyming Slang that again predates all of this.
Does one begat the other? Who knows. There may be a thing within man to speak in code and to bring a smile to the face of those who are hip to what he’s saying.
Much of the character of “Black” church music has its roots in Scotland. I have heard old recordings of church music from Presbyterian churches in remote areas of Scotland (places which had probably, at the time the recordings were made, had never been visited by a black or African person), and also many old recordings of black church music recorded in the deep South from the 1930’s to the 1960’s. In cases of a capella music, these were very similar.....so similar in their idiosyncracies, that the latter must have evolved from the former.
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