- Wilmington will host MC Sha-Rock Day on May 17th to honor hip-hop pioneer and city native Sharon Jackson.
- Jackson, known as MC Sha-Rock, is considered the first female rapper and was an original member of the Funky 4 + 1.
- The celebration will feature live music and an appearance by Jackson, who was born in Wilmington in 1962.
- Jackson has numerous hip-hop firsts, including being the first female MC to sign to a record label and the first to perform on national television.
Hip-hop history is coming home to Wilmington.
This spring, hip-hop pioneer and Wilmington native Sharon Jackson, known as MC Sha-Rock — she’s considered to be the first female rapper — will be honored with a special celebration at Live Oak Bank Pavilion. MC Sha-Rock Day, which is being organized in part by the city of Wilmington Commission on African-American History, is scheduled for May 17.
According to commission member and Wilmington radio personality Brandon “Bigg B” Hickman, the celebration, which is still being planned, will include live music, an appearance by Jackson and more.
New York City has honored Jackson with an MC Sha-Rock Day in The Bronx, where hip-hop originated, for five years, and will have its sixth MC Sha-Rock Day in June.
Living legend:Woman credited as being the first female rapper hails from Wilmington
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Jackson was born Sharon Green in Wilmington in 1962 and attended the former Peabody Elementary School, now Classical Charter Schools of Wilmington, at 507 N. Sixth Ave.
When Jackson was 8, she moved with her family to New York. Until she was 18, however, Jackson came back to Wilmington every summer to stay with her grandparents, the late Naomi and Joseph Pryor, on Campbell Street and later Orange Street, attending First Baptist Missionary Church on North Fifth Avenue and frequenting the historic Black beach spot Seabreeze, near Carolina Beach.
Jackson started rapping as a teenager in New York in 1976 or ’77 and was an original member of one of the first rap groups: the Funky 4 + 1, which emerged from The Bronx and included Jazzy Jeff, D.J. Breakout, Guy Williams and Keith Keith.
The Funky 4 + 1’s first single, “That’s the Joint,” came out just a couple of months after the Sugarhill Gang’s pioneering 1979 single “Rapper’s Delight.”
Jackson is also the first female MC to sign to a record label (Sugar Hill Records in 1979), and she was a participant in the first rap world tour (in 1981) and the first female rapper to perform hip-hop on national television, which she did in 1981 when the Funky 4 + 1 appeared on “Saturday Night Live” with singer Debbie Harry of Blondie.
In January, Jackson was featured in the new documentary “Ladies and Gentlemen…50 Years of SNL Music” to discuss the performance.
Jackson was also part of what’s thought to be the first hip-hop show ever in Wilmington on Dec. 29, 1979, when the Funky Four + 1 played a show at the Martin Luther King Jr. Center on South Eighth Street, and MC Sha-Rock day will serve as an opportunity to highlight the Port City’s connection to hip-hop history.
National Public Radio has called Jackson “a titanic force in early rap communities” who influenced male and female rappers alike, including Darryl “DMC” McDaniels of rap legends Run-DMC, who has credited Jackson with pioneering the “echo chamber” effect that defined much early hip-hop.
Jackson appears alongside such icons as Queen Latifah and MC Lyte in the 2023 Netflix documentary “Ladies First: A Story of Women in Hip Hop.”
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