The DNA of rap music doesn’t start at a 1970s Bronx block party. It starts with a comedian in a graduation cap smacking people with a balloon. Pigmeat Markham’s ‘Here Comes the Judge’ may be the earliest hip-hop record.

This episode charts the astonishing five-decade arc of Dewey ‘Pigmeat’ Markham, from the dirt roads of 1920s burlesque tent shows to network television and an accidental musical revolution, tracing one of the most overlooked through-lines in American pop culture.

• His apprenticeship in Bessie Smith’s traveling revue, where he learned vocal projection and rhythmic delivery as survival
• The complicated reality of a Black performer wearing blackface for Black audiences at the Apollo Theater
• The ‘Here Comes the Judge’ routine, its courtroom subversion, graduation cap, and balloon, as catharsis and social commentary
• Why Sammy Davis Jr. had to perform the bit on Laugh-In first before NBC would hire Markham himself
• The 1968 single that hit number 19 with boastful rhymes over a funk beat, later sampled by Big Audio Dynamite II