How Memphis rap charted a passage from Delta blues

https://www.npr.org/2023/07/21/ [login to see] /hip-hop-50-memphis
To get to Memphis' global influence on hip-hop, you have to reach up and stretch far back, way back, waaaay back on this continent, across people and places and styles and innovations: back beyond the turntables, keep going past Cedar and Sedgwick, turn left at bebop, make a right at Stagger Lee and keep going all the way back to just south of the place — to the fertile fields of the Mississippi Delta. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Black Mississippians' creative labor and ingenuity was exemplified in their remembrance of all the pre-Atlantic ways: their refashioning of the field holler, the call and response, how they held in their throats all those sweet, haunting harmonic signatures that even bested old Pythagoras. Their culture work, spirit and material, is present in gospel, soul, blues, rock and roll, jazz, funk, R&B and all stops beyond and in between. Mississippians like Furry Lewis, Memphis Minnie and Jim Jackson migrated to Memphis and brought blues with them, and a pathway opened up. Like the Caribbean, Africa and New Orleans, Memphis is part of the source material of hip-hop. It is thus unsurprising that on the genre's 50th anniversary, Memphis rap is a dominant force as sampled archive and fecund present. After all, few can deny their mother and expect to live forever.