Winley moved to New York City to work with Ertegün's Atlantic Records, where he wrote for Ruth Brown and Big Joe Turner.
[3][4] Then came The Jesters, students at Cooper Junior High School in Harlem who graduated from singing under an elevated train station near 120th Street to the amateur night contest at the Apollo, where Paul Winley discovered them.
[8] The Paragons Meet The Jesters, originally released by Jubilee in 1959, with its street gang cover and vocal duels inspired by doo-wop's street corner singing battles and live show group competitions, was "one of the first rock and roll compilation LPs",[9] and the most commercially successful doo wop compilation ever released.
Quoting Fileti, David Toop makes the point that these are comments that can equally apply to Winley's hip hop output.
Winley released a series of speeches by Malcolm X, tied into a tradition of black oratory and to be sampled a decade later by Public Enemy and others.
A "break" was a short percussive passage in a record which hip hop DJs would loop (using two copies, one for each turntable) in order for it to be rapped over and/or danced to.
[14] Paul began collecting songs containing popular breaks and compiling them on a series of unofficial records called Super Disco Brake's, beginning in 1979 and eventually running to six volumes.
Tanya Winley raps in the party spirit characteristic of early hip hop, but the lyrics nonetheless detail a case of false arrest, and prophecy that she will "scream and shout ... and tell the government what it's all about".
by Brother D. (Clappers, 1980), "Vicious Rap" was among the first commercially recorded hip hop songs to feature social commentary, rather than party rhymes.
[18] According to Peter Shapiro, though the record is now "ancient-sounding" in hip hop terms, Winley's group here had moved to keep pace with Pumpkin at Enjoy and the Sugarhill band, with Lisa Lee of the Cosmic Force "absolutely destroying all the male MCs".
[1] Death Mix was a vinyl pressing of a third- or fourth- hand cassette tape copy of a bootleg recording of a Bambaataa Zulu Nation night at James Monroe High School in the Bronx in 1980.
After releasing "Street Rock" by Rap Dynasty in 1985, the label folded, though two discs appeared in 2007 bearing the imprint's name and purporting to contain Bambaataa material from the 1970s.