This chapter identifies the intersection between the role of hip-hop music in literary poetry and the operation of poetics in rap by chronicling the parallel histories of the music and the poetic practices developed alongside and in response to it. It traces the emergence of rap from party music, identifies what constitutes poetics in the lyrics and the construction of the music, and clarifies how the music and literary poetry overlap in spoken word, in slam poetics, in TV shows like Def Poetry Jam, and in emerging academic programs and centers.

“Poetry can be a genre of history,” proclaimed Natasha Trethewey, underscoring the role of historical poetry as a repository of cultural memory commensurate with and even more reliable than traditional histories. This chapter traces this distinctive turn to history among African American poets that emerged in the twenty-first century and characterizes aspects of the cumulative impact this verse has had of revising the nation’s history. It exemplifies this impact by analyzing “A Postcard From Okemah” by Terrance Hayes, which addresses a 1911 lynching; Evie Shockley’s “dependences,” which questions the reputation of Thomas Jefferson by demonstrating the contradictions between his words and his actions; and how, in leadbelly, Tyehimba Jess frees Huddie Ledbetter from the shadow of folklorist John Lomax and prominently positions him in the annals of American music. He offers a portrait of a Huddie Ledbetter who had agency, who hired a lawyer and sued for proper compensation, and whose musical contributions stand alone. In these new public histories, Hayes, Shockley, and Jess offer hope for a more just future.

This chapter turns to the sorrow songs, beginning with the famous passage from Frederick Douglass’s autobiographies. It focuses on the ethnography of African American song traditions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a period of professionalisation of folklore studies in the American academy. White folklorists claimed the songs were irrational, primitive, childlike, unmediated expressions of feeling; other qualities were discovered by African American ethnographers, including Zora Neale Hurston. The songs were also forms of exploitative labour. The chapter includes a reading of Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poem ‘A Corn Song’. Dunbar’s shifts between African American vernacular and ‘standard’ English illuminate the tendency of white folklorists to call attention to the failure of the printed and disembodied textual transcription to transmit the real power of the performed lyric. The chapter considers the attempt to secure an ‘authentic’ Black sound through recordings in prisons and labour camps. It also challenges the notion of authenticity through a reading of Olio by Tyehimba Jess, a work that seeks to recover – through a form of poetic ventriloquy – the thoughts and feelings of the artists whose work was appropriated by white critics, scholars and producers in this period.