Millie Jackson

Mildred Virginia Jackson (born July 15, 1944) is an American R&B and soul recording artist. Beginning her career in the early 1960s, three of Jackson's albums have been certified gold by the RIAA for over 500,000 copies sold. Jackson's songs often include long spoken sections, sometimes humorous, sometimes sexually explicit. She recorded songs in an R&B, disco, or dance-music style and occasionally in a country style. Occasionally, Jackson has been called the "mother of hip-hop," or of rapping itself. This has more to do with the long spoken sections in many of her songs as opposed to actual rapping. According to the cataloguing site WhoSampled.com, her songs have appeared in 189 samples, 51 covers, and six remixes. "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)." Early life Born in Thomson, Georgia, Jackson is the daughter of a sharecropper, Jubilee Jackson. Her mother died when she was a child and subsequently, she and her father moved to the New York City area and settled in Newark, New Jersey. By the time Jackson was in her mid-teens, she had moved into New York City to live with an aunt who resided in Brooklyn. She found an occasional modeling gig for magazines like JIVE and Sepia.