Gary Campbell looked out onto Judkins Park in Seattle’s Central District on a sunny summer afternoon. The first Pacific Northwest Black Community Festival took place here in the 1940s. Decades later, in 1982, the event packed the park with around 10,000 people filling booths and food stalls, watching concerts and connecting.
The Emerald Street Boys won the festival’s first rap-off that year. The group was made up of three teenagers who went by Sweet J, Sugar Bear and Captain Crunch. It was “the first time hip-hop music really appeared in any kind of big way in the city of Seattle,” Campbell said.
A few years later, in 1988, Sir Mix-A-Lot and Kid Sensation played the festival.
The Black Community Festival is now known as Umoja Fest and takes place every August.
Judkins Park is just one stop on a tour that Campbell created to focus on the history of hip-hop in Seattle, including events and landmarks that helped shape the scene. Campbell, a Seattle-based artist, hopes his maps shed light on a different group of artists who were bubbling up around the same time that grunge exploded.
The guides will be available in front of King Street Station during Art Walk in Pioneer Square, which happens on the first Thursday of every month.
Hubs for creativity
The next stop on Campbell's tour is Bryant Manor, an apartment building at Pratt Park that has provided affordable housing for decades.
“Bryant Manor is where Sir Mix-A-Lot grew up,” Campbell said. “On his 1993 Grammy-nominated song, ‘Just Da Pimpin' in Me,’ Sir Mix-a-Lot raps: ‘Nineteenth and Yesler raised me. Bryant Manor 1883 put the pimpin' in me.’”
Campbell’s maps include archival photos and two routes — from the Central District to Capitol Hill, and from Seattle Center to Downtown. It takes people to theaters, local restaurants and record stores. One place that no longer exists on 23rd and Union was Dirt Cheap Records and Tapes, which stocked the latest rap singles. Another spot on the tour that is still very much alive is the Paramount Theater, which in the late 1980s hosted Seattle’s first hip-hop showcase called Spring Rapfest.
“Some of these places have been hubs for the local music, rap and hip-hop communities over many years, over many decades,” Campbell said. “And, in some cases, continue to be important hubs for the community and the scene today.”
Hip-hop historian
When Campbell moved from Toronto to Seattle 13 years ago, he became interested in the local hip-hop scene.
“I was told, ‘When you move to the United States, you should learn about hip-hop music because that's an essential part of the DNA of this country,’” he said. “I found myself really fascinated in the music and the stories that are behind that.”
Campbell isn’t just some guy who likes hip-hop. In 2017, he created an independent hip-hop record label in Seattle called Crane City Music. He is also writing a book that will be an archive of records released between 1983 and 1993 by local hip-hop artists, such as Chilly Uptown, Ice Cold Mode and Kid Sensation.
“I got really fascinated in trying to find as many of these records as I could, because a lot of this music has never made its way online. A lot of it was self-released,” Campbell said.
He hasn’t set a release date for his book, but that research helped him compile this map.
‘A huge deal’
Stops along the tour helped develop rappers who eventually won Grammys, Campbell said. Sir Mix-A-Lot won a Grammy in 1993 for his hit “Baby Got Back.” A year later, Ishmael Butler from Digable Planets won a Grammy for “Rebirth of Slick (Cool Like Dat).”
“The biggest rap stars, according to the Grammys, were both two guys from Seattle, and that was happening concurrently to grunge,” he said.
Campbell makes the case that hip-hop may have actually contributed to the rise of the Seattle grunge scene. In 1989, Sir Mix-A-Lot’s album Swass was declared a gold record. His label, Nasty Mix Records, threw a huge party at the Four Seasons Olympic Hotel.
“When Mix’s record went gold on Nasty Mix, it was the first time the recording industry had come to Seattle to award a gold record,” Campbell said. “In some ways, you can point to this party as what brought media attention, what brought global attention, to the Northwest, that two years later led to a grunge explosion.”
In 1991, Nirvana released Nevermind, Pearl Jam released Ten, and Soundgarden released Badmotorfinger — all within three months of each other.
“This is an amazing story to think about how Sir Mix-A-lot played such an important role in bringing attention to the Northwest that, in some ways, brought about the enormous success of what grunge was,” Campbell said.
Soundgarden’s Kim Thayil backs up this idea with a quote in The Rocket, a Seattle music magazine that has stopped publishing. Thayil said, “When Mix’s record went gold on Nastymix, it was the first time the RIAA had to come to Seattle to award a Gold Record. It was a huge deal.”
Despite all of this, Campbell feels the stars of Seattle’s hip-hop scene in the 1980s and 90s never received the same attention as grunge artists.
“I got really interested in trying to shine a spotlight on a different group of heroes from the music scene of the city,” he said.
History does not have to be permanent, Campbell said. We can go back and reevaluate what has already been recorded. In doing so, he said, we can figure out whose stories are missing and work to include them moving forward. In the world of hip-hop, Campbell hopes his pocket maps will help do that.
