Sylvia Robinson

Sylvia Robinson (1936 - 2011), made an indelible mark on African-American music as a singer, producer and record company owner. She sang on hit records from the 1950s to the 1970s, and then became known as "the mother of hip-hop" after she was among the first to recognize the potential of the nascent rap scene in the streets and clubs of New York.

She was born Sylvia Vanderpool in New York. As a 14-year-old student at Washington Irving High School, her vocal talent led to her first recordings, singing blues with a band led by the trumpeter Hot Lips Page. Between 1956 and 1962, she worked as a duo with her former guitar teacher, the virtuoso instrumentalist Mickey Baker. As Mickey & Sylvia, they had a huge hit with Love Is Strange, which featured Sylvia's idiosyncratic pronunciation of "baby", a vocal quirk that was to enter the wider sphere when it was adopted by Buddy Holly. Other hits featuring their soft harmonies included There Oughta Be a Law and Baby You're So Fine.

In 1962 Baker moved to Paris, bringing their partnership to an end. Sylvia married the musician Joe Robinson in 1964. She immersed herself in the music business and ran a club in the Bronx before the couple moved to Englewood, New Jersey. There, they opened Soul Sound, an eight-track recording studio which, like Motown and Stax, had its own house band of backing musicians.

The Robinsons formed the All Platinum record company in 1968, and Sylvia became one of the few female record producers at the time. She wrote and produced hits such as Love On a Two-Way Street (1970) for the Moments and Shame, Shame, Shame (1975) for Shirley and Company. She also worked with such established soul singers as Brook Benton and Chuck Jackson. The company's biggest hit was Pillow Talk, written and performed by Sylvia. After the song had been turned down as too risque by the soul star Al Green, Sylvia recorded the disco track in 1973. Her sighs and gasps anticipated by two years the full-scale eroticism of Donna Summer's global hit Love to Love You Baby. Pillow Talk reached No 3 in the US and No 14 in the UK in 1973.

By the late 1970s, All Platinum was in financial difficulties, caused in part by the Robinsons' purchase in 1975 for close to $1m of the rights to the Chess Records catalogue, which included recordings by Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters. They intended to record new material under the Chess banner, but found they could not afford to.

In 1979 the company was thrown a lifeline. Sylvia was alerted by her teenage son Joey to the new sounds developing in the Bronx. "All of a sudden, a voice said to me, if you put a concept like that on wax you'll be out of all that trouble you're in," she said. Accounts differ as to where this eureka moment occurred. One is that she attended a party where three young men were rapping though a microphone. Another is that she heard one of the trio rapping in a pizza shop where he worked. A third is that her son brought a schoolfriend home to rap for her. Whichever is the case, Sylvia took the three youths (known as Big Bank Hank, Wonder Mike and Master Gee) into the studio, naming them the Sugarhill Gang.

The resulting track, Rapper's Delight, was soon selling 50,000 copies a day. It became a top 40 hit in the US and reached No 3 in the UK. The single launched the Robinsons' Sugar Hill Records label and Sylvia became a leading figure in the rapid proliferation of hip-hop music worldwide. The label's most famous track is probably The Message by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, whose hard-hitting protest lyrics inspired a generation of artists. Sugar Hill's other singles included Funk You Up by the Sequence, one of the first all-female hip-hop groups, and Jesse by Melle Mel, a rap in support of Jesse Jackson's bid to become the Democratic presidential candidate in 1984.

In addition to supervising the studio recordings, Sylvia wrote lyrics and found existing records whose rhythms could be adapted to support the vocalising of her young hip-hop stars. Occasionally, this caused copyright problems. While early pressings of Rapper's Delight were credited to Sylvia and the Gang, later versions listed Bernard Edwards and Nile Rodgers of Chic, upon whose Good Times the backing track of Rapper's Delight had been based.

By the mid-1980s, Sugar Hill had been eclipsed by young hip-hop entrepreneurs who took the genre further into what became known as gangsta rap. The Robinsons eventually sold the company to Rhino Records, a specialist in reissues. They retained the studio, which was run by their sons until it was destroyed in a fire in 2002.

Her husband Joe died in 2000. Sylvia is survived by her sons, Joey, Leland and Rhondo, and 10 grandchildren.

Article: The Guardian, by David Laing
Photo: LA Times