Sylvia Robinson

• 1. The Mother Of Hip Hop

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  In 2022, Sylvia Robinson was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in the Ahmet Ertegun Award category, the first woman to receive that honor unaccompanied by another person. She had been dead for eleven years. The recognition arrived for a reason most listeners would never guess from her early life. Born Sylvia Vanterpool in Harlem on the 29th of May 1935, she dropped out of high school at fourteen and started cutting records as a teenager. Several publications have called her the Mother of Hip Hop. How does a girl billed as Little Sylvia end up credited as the driving force behind two of rap's founding singles? What made a successful R&B singer decide to bet everything on a sound nobody had yet figured out how to sell? And why, decades after the music changed the industry, was she still telling artists to come up with something new, something different?

• 2. Two Chart Toppers

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  Sylvia Vanterpool began recording in 1950 for Columbia Records under the name Little Sylvia, working alongside the trumpeter, vocalist, and bandleader Hot Lips Page. Her father, Herbert, worked for General Motors. Her mother was named Ida. She had attended Washington Irving High School before leaving it behind.

  In 1954, she teamed up with the Kentucky guitarist Mickey Baker, who taught her to play guitar. The duo became Mickey & Sylvia, and in 1956 they recorded a rock single written by Bo Diddley and Jody Williams. That song, "Love Is Strange", topped the R&B chart and reached number eleven on the Billboard pop chart in early 1957. After a few more releases, including the modestly successful "There Oughta Be a Law", the pair split in 1958.

  In 1972, Robinson sent a demo of a song she had written, "Pillow Talk", to Al Green. He passed on it because of his religious beliefs. So she recorded it herself, billed simply as Sylvia. The record reached number one on the R&B chart and number three on the Billboard Hot 100, and it climbed to number fourteen on the UK Singles Chart in the summer of 1973. The R.I.A.A. awarded her a gold disc in May 1973, and she earned a Grammy nomination for Best Female R&B Vocal Performance at the 1974 ceremony.

  The critic Robert Christgau reviewed her debut LP, also titled Pillow Talk. He called it "Let's Get It On without production values" and praised what he termed the best peace lyric heard lately, a track called "Had Any Lately?". The song's subtly orgasmic gasps predated those of Donna Summer's 1975 "Love to Love You Baby".

• 3. The Producer In The Room

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  "I paid for the session, taught Tina the song; that's me playing guitar," Robinson told Black Radio Exclusive in a 1981 interview. She was describing Ike & Tina Turner's 1961 hit "It's Gonna Work Out Fine", the record that earned the Turners their first Grammy nomination. On that session, Mickey Baker provided vocals and Robinson played guitar.

  In 1960, she produced Joe Jones's record "You Talk Too Much" without receiving credit. This pattern, of doing the work and standing behind the curtain, ran through her early career. By the time Baker grew frustrated with the music business and moved to Paris in 1964, Robinson was already building something larger than a performing duo.

  In 1966, she and her husband Joseph Robinson moved to New Jersey, and the following year they founded a soul label called All Platinum Records. The artist Lezli Valentine, formerly of the Jaynetts, gave the label its first hit with "I Won't Do Anything". In 1968 the couple signed a Washington, D.C. act called The Moments, who scored immediately with "Not on the Outside".

  The Moments' biggest hit came in 1970 with "Love on a Two-Way Street", which Robinson co-wrote and produced with Bert Keyes, using uncredited lyrics by Lezli Valentine. Across All Platinum and its subsidiaries, Stang and Vibration, the hits kept coming. There was Shirley & Company's "Shame, Shame, Shame" in 1975, The Moments' "Sexy Mama", and Retta Young's "(Sending Out An) S.O.S.". Two members of The Moments, Al Goodman and Harry Ray, later supported her work, along with producers George Kerr and Nate Edmonds.

• 4. Selling A Sound That Didn't Exist

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  Sugar Hill Records took its name from the culturally rich Sugar Hill area of Harlem, an affluent African-American neighborhood in Manhattan known as a hub for artists and performers in the early and mid-1900s. The Robinsons co-founded the label in the 1970s, and it became the vehicle for the music that would carry Robinson's name into history.

  "Rapper's Delight", performed by The Sugarhill Gang in 1979, brought rap into the public music arena as one of the first commercially successful hip hop songs. It introduced rap, scratch, and breakdance to a wide audience and changed how the music industry thought about the form. Robinson produced it.

  The Sequence, an all-female rap and funk group, was among the acts that followed. The group featured a teenage Angie Stone, recording as Angie B, and they scored a million-selling hit in early 1980 with "Funk U Up". By then Sugar Hill had proven that a sound with no commercial precedent could sell records by the million.

• 5. The Message

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  "She would ask us for a period of time about doing a record having to do with the real life things that happen in the 'hood. And we kind of ducked it for a minute," Grandmaster Flash recalled. The record in question was "The Message", performed in 1982 by Grandmaster Flash and The Furious Five. Robinson produced it with Grandmaster Melle Mel, and the song described life in the ghetto.

  Without Robinson's insistence and pressure, by the account preserved here, there would be no "The Message". It was the first record of its kind, where the DJ, the cornerstone of hip hop at that time, was not involved in creating a track that the group performed. The push came from the executive, not the performers.

  On the 5th of December 2012, Rolling Stone placed "The Message" at number one on its list of the 50 Greatest Hip-Hop Songs of All Time. To build the list, the publication polled 33 artists and experts across every genre, among them Busta Rhymes, Boots Riley of the Coup, Mike D of the Beastie Boys, and Talib Kweli. Their votes put a Sylvia Robinson production at the very top.

• 6. After Sugar Hill

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  Sugar Hill Records folded in 1985. Changes in the music industry, competition from labels such as Profile and Def Jam, and financial pressures all closed in at once. By that point Robinson had divorced Joe Robinson, and she did not stop working.

  In 1987 she formed Bon Ami Records. The label was noted for signing an act called The New Style, who later left and found success under a different name, Naughty by Nature. The instinct for spotting talent outlived the company that made her famous.

  Robinson had been married to the businessman Joseph Robinson Sr., who lived from 1932 to 2000, from May 1959 until their amicable divorce in the late 1980s. Together they had three children, sons Joseph "Joey" Robinson Jr., Leland Robinson, and Rhondo "Scutchie" Robinson. In the 1960s she owned a Harlem bar named "Joey's Place" after her husband, and another New York bar and nightclub called the Blue Morocco. She died on the morning of the 29th of September 2011, at the age of 76, at Meadowlands Hospital in Secaucus, New Jersey, of congestive heart failure.

• 7. Her Mantra On Screen

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  "Don't copy things that are out there... come up with something new, something different," ran Robinson's mantra, cited by the writer M. K. Asante in a March 2015 piece in The New York Times debating U.S. copyright laws. The line outlasted her, invoked in an argument about how artists should make new work rather than borrow old.

  Her presence kept surfacing in popular culture. In 2003 the electronic musician Moby sampled her song "Sunday" for his track "Sunday (The Day Before My Birthday)". In 2014, the actress Retta played her in the Drunk History episode "American Music". She is one of the inspirations for the character Cookie Lyon, played by Taraji P. Henson, on the Fox television show Empire.

  The screenwriters Malcolm Spellman and Carlito Rodriguez, two of the writers on Empire, were tapped to script a biopic of Robinson's life. The producer Paula Wagner acquired the film rights in 2014 from Robinson's son Joey, an executive at Sugar Hill Records who died in July 2015. By October 2018, the writer Tracy Oliver had joined the script, Justin Simien had been attached to direct, and Oliver was set to executive produce alongside Robinson's son Leland.