Millie Jackson

Mildred Virginia Jackson (born July 15, 1944) is an American R&B and Soul singer-songwriter and former model. Beginning her career in the early 1960s, six of Jackson's albums have been certified gold by the RIAA for over 500,000 copies. Jackson vocal performances are often distinguished by long, humorous, and explicit spoken sections in her music, which she started doing on stage to get the attention of the audience. She recorded songs in a disco or dance music style and occasionally in a country style. Occasionally, Jackson refers to herself as other have toted as the "mother of hip-hop," or of rapping itself. According to the cataloguing site WhoSampled.com, her songs have appeared in 189 samples, 51 covers, 6 remixes revealing the appeal of her proto-typical rapping style of delivery. Since she always enjoyed writing poems, in the early '70s Jackson began crafting such proto-rap R&B singles as the outspoken "A Child of God (It's Hard To Believe)."Since her songs often feature excessive vulgarity and sexual positivity for women, her body of work is readily associated with hip-hop despite the hyper-masculinity stereotypically attributed to the genre.